Students interested in studying abroad gathered at Ida Noyes the evening of January 10 for the Study Abroad Student Fair, where students who had participated in programs abroad answered questions about their experiences.
UChicago offers both faculty-led and direct-enrollment study abroad opportunities around the world. Many of the faculty-led offerings fulfill the civilization studies core requirement—whose focus on world cultures and history lends itself to international study—in a single quarter.
“Since we have to do the civilizations requirement anyway, it’s not as though I’m going out of my way to [study abroad],” second-year Gabriel Jinich said in an interview with The Maroon at the fair. “I just want to take the opportunity to learn more than I would taking civilizations on campus.”
Many students at the fair expressed that easy opportunities to go abroad are rare. “I think it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience—living in a different area, experiencing different cultures, speaking the language,” first-year Colleen Kim said in an interview with The Maroon. “For me, I’m interested in Paris because I applied for French when I applied here, and I knew [UChicago] had a whole program. I just think the chance to go is super big and you can take so many classes I was interested in for my major. You can get a lot of things done still going.”
“I always hear people wanting to travel the world and gaining experience, or learning a whole new connection with humanity or whatever the case is,” first-year Ealaf Adam said. “I just want to experience that bit of it.”
Yinong Wang, a third-year who participated in the Jerusalem in Middle Eastern Civilizations program last quarter, emphasized the difference between watching people’s experiences from afar and seeing them up close. “[Studying abroad] offered me a challenge to learn or to approach the modern conflict, the relevant conflict between Israel and Palestine, from a more nuanced and local perspective,” he said. “You learn the sides of people with different religious ideas and with different political affiliations who live in the region of Jerusalem and Palestine, how they view history and how they deal with their context, and what their proposals are. It’s much, much better and [more] helpful than the more polarized debate you have outside of that region.”
Wang said it wasn’t just the Israel-Palestine conflict that he witnessed firsthand while studying abroad. “Our study abroad program overlapped with the judicial overhaul they had in Israel, so I got to see how [Israelis] engaged themselves with their national politics,” he said. “All of these kinds of experiences are very enriched and unique.”
The University’s Center in Paris, which hosts more than 200 undergraduates every year, houses many faculty-run programs and is a hub for UChicago students abroad. “I definitely really appreciated that we had a center,” said Amelia Cheng, a third-year who participated in the neuroscience program there. “It kind of felt like a home base that you could just come and find comfort in.” She added that because of the number of programs hosted at the Center, “you’re in a cohort of 10 people or 12 people [within your program], but you also are with up to 90 or 100 people at a time, which is an experience pretty unique to Paris.”
“I went in definitely getting more nervous the closer it got to the day to fly out,” said Pooja Keerthipati, a fourth-year who studied in Paris. “But I think it’s all worth it once you get there. You end up becoming very close with the people that are there. It’s like a support system.”
Students from other programs appreciated opportunities to interact with students from different universities. “I think the cool thing about my program was that I got to love the host family, and I got to take classes with a couple kids from UChicago and then a ton of kids that weren’t from UChicago,” said second-year Liv Moreno, who spent last quarter in the intermediate Spanish program in Toledo. “So it was really unique in that I got to have truly another worldly perspective [with] my classmates from Japan and my classmates from Puerto Rico.”
Moreno added that living outside a major city was a plus for her. “I feel like a lot of the study abroad programs are in really big, central cities in Europe, and Toledo was a much smaller city,” she said. “So I loved that I really got to know kind of everything about the city, and it really started to feel like home there.”
While most offerings run for a single quarter, there are also three-week September term options and some direct-enrollment opportunities that run for an entire year. Julio Tsimpos, a third-year who hasn’t yet studied abroad, said he was interested in some of the British direct-enrollment programs in part because they were “year-long, which I think is better, more immersive. I can really see how [the U.K.] is from the inside.”
Henry Huschke, a third-year who went to Paris for the Law, Letters, and Society program in the abbreviated September term, said the short timeline didn’t make for a worse experience. “During the three-week program, it’s a little bit different; you only take one class,” he said. “Classes will usually be in the mornings, so you can get the rest of the day to explore where you are, so that was a super awesome opportunity. I got to meet all these people in my major and get really close with them and meet people I didn’t know before. It was great.”
Moreno encouraged students considering studying abroad to go for it. “I didn’t feel ready at all. When I was getting on the plane, I was like, ‘This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever done. I can’t believe I’m getting on a plane to another country for three months and I don’t speak Spanish,’” she said. “You will realize when you get there that you didn’t need to be as ready as you wished. You just need to jump into it and go for it because it’ll absolutely turn out in your favor.”