Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Short-Term Abroad

Athletic or academic commitments, personal or familial obligations can sometimes complicate or even rule out a full semester abroad, but D'Agostino contends that "students can have a really immersive experience in three or four weeks if you design the program right."

The multitude of short-term abroad programs offered during summer and winter break "opens up a different audience and a different stage to ask questions that are locally relevant but globally applicable," says Associate Professor of Biology Meghan Brown.

An intensive three-week program to Guatemala in 2016, for instance, explored "culture and ecology as intrinsically linked concepts," explains

Associate Professor of Psychology Brien Ashdown, who led the program with Brown. "The culture of a place and the geography and ecology of that place are interwoven to such an extent that it's really impossible to understand one without the other."

The program was based around Lake Atitlan. "Perched on a volcanic rim," Brown explains, the lake is "facing a problem of algal blooms. As a scientist, it's an easy problem to solve but as a citizen it's really hard. There are psychological, cultural and political lenses: coming out of the country's civil war, there's corruption that makes funding for projects hard; there's a group of people nearby who believe the lake will clean itself; there's the tourism issue. All of this allows us to ask questions that are locally relevant but globally applicable, which is really important for problem-solving, especially after students leave HWS, because most of the world's problems aren't singular - they're interdisciplinary."

Professor Nan Crystal Arens, who has led the Department of Geoscience short-term Bahamas field course three times, says that such programs can accelerate both "how students look at problems abroad and at home" and how they use those ideas "as jumping off points for interrogating how we do things in the U.S."

"It's easy to have preconceptions about the environment," says Rachael Barry '19, who worked with Arens on the most recent Bahamas program. Off-campus field research means "having to account for all the differences and apply the fundamentals learned on campus in novel environments."

In the Bahamas, she and Associate Professor of Geoscience David Kendrick first discussed the idea for what is now her Honors project, which explores "the ecology of an ancient tropical ocean and what happens in microbial environments when the environmental pressures change." Barry, who also spent a semester studying in Australia, notes how special those opportunities are, "especially in a research setting, to develop a personal connection with professors."