Volume 27 · Number 4 · Summer 2010
Aggies Abroad
Growing numbers of UC Davis students are earning credit toward their majors and getting résumé-building experience while seeing the world.
An entry in the Education Abroad photo contest: man rowing on the Yamuna River in Delhi, India, by Chelsea Snow ’10.
It’s halfway through 2010. Do you know where UC Davis students are?
They could be studying in Shields Library, playing in a three-on-three intramural basketball tournament at the ARC, back home reconnecting with their families or working a summer job. Or they could be winging their way home from an education and culture program in Havana, arriving in London to design museum exhibits, studying the structural engineering of the Pantheon in Rome or brushing up on their Spanish in preparation for a fall internship at health care clinics in Oaxaca, Mexico.
For much of their undergraduate years, students gravitate to classrooms, lecture halls and labs in Davis and Sacramento. But increasingly, a UC Davis education is also sending students into a wider orbit — around the globe.
Over the past decade, education-abroad programs have expanded far beyond the junior year at a foreign university. More than 1,000 UC Davis students participate each year in study-abroad programs, with close to one-fifth of those students signing on for yearlong immersion programs. The rest opt for semester, quarter or summer programs, many of which combine academic studies with practical experience. Until recently, UC Davis’ Education Abroad Program was the only one within the 10-campus UC system to offer a mix of yearlong and quarter programs. UCLA recently launched quarter programs in Egypt and Greece.
Summer trips are, by far, UC Davis’ most popular. A total of 823 students traveled to 38 countries in summer 2009, an 8 percent increase in participation compared with the previous year. Despite the faltering U.S. economy, numbers are equally high this summer.
Financial aid
A scholarship fund to help more students study abroad has received close to $84,000 in contributions since it was established in spring 2009 as a tribute to former Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef.
Eric Schroeder, who directs both UC Davis’ Education Abroad Center and the Summer Abroad Program, said the quarter offerings fit better in students’ busy lives, with many of the programs built around core courses in various majors. In one program this summer, students will earn civil and environmental engineering credits while studying water quality management in Ireland. Another new offering, a first for design students, will examine the design of museum exhibits and public art in Britain. A landscape architecture and environmental science and policy course, “Sustainable Cities of Northern Europe,” filled within one week after the application period opened.
Another photo contest entry: a neighborhood in Malmo, Sweden, by Ruth Xochihua (UC Merced)
“It’s not, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s, ‘If you built it right, they will come,’” Schroeder said. “Now it’s not enough to just be abroad. It has to be value added.”
About 10–15 percent of UC Davis students study in a foreign country before graduating. Schroeder said he’d like to increase participation to 50 percent by 2020.
And even if you’ve already graduated, you can still go. About 30 percent of the participants in UC Davis’ Summer Abroad programs are non-Aggies and some of those are nonstudents, Schroeder said. On one recent program, a student was joined by her mom.
For more information about the various offerings, visit Education Abroad Center.
Even if you stay home, you can always view the world through students’ eyes. We feature here some of the entries in the Education Abroad Center’s most recent annual photo contest. This year’s contest, co-sponsored by University Communications, was the biggest yet with more than 500 entries by students who traveled abroad in 2008–09. All of the photos can be viewed online.
We also asked alums to write us about how their study-abroad experiences changed their lives. Read those essays...