Some students might describe coming to Wesleyan as “culture shock.” But just a couple of short years later, many launch themselves into even more exotic surroundings through study abroad programs, only to re-enter Wesleyan with a whole new set of adjustments to make.
Study abroad programs are as diverse as the students who participate in them. Wesleyan students have gone to France, Jamaica, Ghana and India.
Lisa Schottenfeld ’05 attended a Tibetan Studies Program through the School for International Training.
“I spent the first month living with a Tibetan family in Dharamsala, India (the capital of the Tibetan government-in-exile),” Schottenfeld said. “There, we took Tibetan language classes and had daily lectures with people in the Tibetan community (government officials, ex-political prisoners, etc.)”
Meanwhile, Laurel Steinhauser ’05 stayed in Kingston, Jamaica for four months and participated in a program on gender and development.
“The focus of most of the program was on experiential, community-based learning, so I spent a great deal of time out in the community learning from the people that I interacted with on a daily basis,” Steinhauser said.
The programs Schottenfeld and Steinhauser attended allow students to pursue individual study projects focused on a topic of their choice. For her project, Schottenfeld traveled to the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe in South India, stayed in a monastery, and researched civil liberties in the Tibetan exile community. Steinhauser, meanwhile, worked with a group of teenagers from a performing arts ensemble on improvisational movement.
“They ended up creating this performance piece about teenage pregnanc—hich is a huge issue in Kingsto—sing dance, movement, singing, drumming, and monologues that they wrote, so that was pretty cool,” Steinahauser said.
Schottenfeld said that differences in culture and communication played an important role in making study abroad a unique experience.
“I loved living with my home stay family,” she said. “They only had two tiny rooms, but they shared everything they had with me, and even helped me with my Tibetan language homework along the way. I couldn’t communicate verbally with my brother and sister (ages six and nine), but managed to get really close with them anyway. That’s one thing that was differen—amilies there are so much more close-knit than families here generally are.”
Instead of taking classes in Tibet, Schottenfeld learned experientially.
“I didn’t go to an official school there, but I learned more from my fieldwork and independent project than I could have learned from going to classes,” she said. “In south India, I talked to dozens of Tibetans about their opinions on their government and the political process that’s been set up in exile. It was great to finally be able to hear it firsthand rather than just reading books on the topic. It’s given me a whole new outlook on the world. Worrying about a hard class at Wesleyan is put into perspective once you’ve talked to people who have come across the Himalayas on foot in order to escape the Chinese regime.”
Steinhauser also said she found her experience eye-opening.
“I gained an entirely new perspective on the way the world works and the role that I want to play within this global community,” she said.
For Schottenfeld, returning to the United States posed its own challenges.
“I actually had a fair bit of culture shock coming back here,” she said. “I wasn’t used to supermarkets, or being able to communicate easily. I’d gotten fairly good at combining my broken Tibetan with games of charades.”
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