Macalester students abroad

With pleasure we at the Macalester College International Center announce our off-campus study group for the spring of 2009.

The Study Away Review Committee (SARC) has approved 160 proposals for the spring semester; 148 of these were submitted in September of 2008; 12 were approved in the previous decision cycle, last spring -- two for year-long programs and ten for the Macalester Maastricht program .

Some interesting features of this group:

• Twenty-five or thirty of them want to study abroad mainly to improve language skills -- in Arabic, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
• The Netherlands will be the single most popular country destination, with 18 students. Students are attracted mostly to two particular programs: Macalester's own Globalization in Comparative Perspective in Maastricht (ten students), and IES Amsterdam's Gender Studies program (four of eight.)
• The single most popular program will be Denmark International Studies in Copenhagen, 13 students. Most of these will pursue either the Medical Practice and Policy or the Psychology and Child Development track.
• Thirteen students will enroll directly in some of Europe's finest universities: Edinburgh (seven students!) and St. Andrews in Scotland; King's College and the School for Oriental and African Studies in London; the University of York, in York; and the Paris Universities. Macalester has a long history at all of these except York, and our students have done very well at all of them. York is a new destination for us; our student chose it for its highly ranked Psychology department (fourth in the UK, just behind Oxford and Cambridge).
• The most popular country destinations will be: Netherlands, 18 students; Denmark, 13; Brazil, 9; Argentina and Scotland, 7 each. If you were to treat the UK as a single country, it would come in second, with 17: seven in Scotland, five in England, five in Northern Ireland.
• New destinations for Macalester students: Israel (Hebrew University), Sri Lanka (the ISLE program in Kandy), Croatia, and Uganda/Rwanda. Israel and Sri Lanka have just become open to Macalester students due to a modification of college policy regarding study in countries on the State Department travel warning list. Students headed to Uganda are interested mainly in the aftermath of troubles in Rwanda.
• For the first time Brazil has become the top Latin American destination and, another first for Macalester, Sao Paulo will be the most popular city. Students are attracted to Brazil for Amazon studies, for Portuguese, for African diaspora issues (especially in Salvador de Bahia), and urban studies in Sao Paulo.
• A striking number of students __ and __, respectively, will pursue the new public health and human rights concentrations.
• Students from two of our smaller departments will be headed abroad in comparatively large numbers: five each from WGSS and American Studies.
• The leading departments in terms of majors going abroad are Political Science (29), International Studies (25), Anthropology (20), Psychology (13), and English, Environmental Studies, and Biology (10 each).
• Twenty-five percent of students headed abroad in the spring are double majors.
• At least 45 students -- probably more -- will do independent study projects, resulting in substantial papers. Their proposed topics (these often change) include -- just to give a sample:

Reforestation in Australia
Gentrification in Buenos Aires
The Theater of the Oppressed in Brazil
The lives of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka
Arthropod diversity in Costa Rica
Mapping the range of toad species in Costa Rica
The ecological effects of cattle ranching in Costa Rica
Midwifery in Quito, Ecuador
Land reform in South Africa
Traditional dance in Ghana
The effects of subsistence practices on forest birds in Madagascar
Women and family law in Morocco
Subversive Sexualities in the Balkans

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