There is nothing quite like the excitement of taking a trip to a new destination. This excitement is even greater when traveling with a group of curious and energetic students. Today we traveled from Columbia, South Carolina to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where we arrived late tonight. The students are all in the master's program in Higher Education and Student Affairs at the University of South Carolina. We will be visiting with students, faculty, and administrators at several universities as well as officials from the Ministry of Education to learn more about Dominican higher education.The origins of this trip are several. As a student I loved my study abroad experiences. My first was to the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1988 while I was still in high school. This was a transformative experience for me, opening my eyes to a world I could only read about (and only partially, at that), but not fully understand. I immediately understood that there was no substitute for "being there." In high school it was my practice to get to know the international students; I was genuinely curious about their experiences in my school and country and about what life in theirs was like. I started studying Spanish in junior high and remember making friends with students from Latin America so I could practice my language skills. By the end of high school I was relatively fluent--and quite anxious to learn other languages. I did what I could to self-teach myself some Russian for my trip to the Soviet Union. During my senior year at Nashua High I worked at a hotel that employed a great number of Brazilians. Naturally, I took advantage of the opportunity to learn as much Portuguese as I could.
This curiosity about language and culture continued into college. I majored in Spanish and I had the opportunity to interrupt my studies for two years of service in Chile. I studied abroad again, this time in México for a term. When I earned my master's degree, focusing on higher education, the job I coveted was to be a study abroad advisor.
As a professor I've combined my interest in culture and language with my work in higher education. I was invited to give a keynote address at a conference in Santiago, Chile in 2007 and took advantage to do a some research while there. The following year I spent a week in Lima, Perú visiting four universities and studying student roles in governance and student protests. I presented papers at meetings of the Comparative and International Education Society based on the research from those two trips.
In 2008 a group from Taiwan visited USC and invited faculty to submit for a travel grant to study in Taiwan. I couldn't pass that up and was fortunate to get one of the grants and spent two weeks in Taipei and circumnavigating the entire island. The following year I went back to Taipei, leading our department's first study abroad group. This was a wonderful experience as I saw the influence the trip had on students--especially as I reminisced how it had been an influence on me 20 years earlier when I took my first trip to an exotic land.
I wish I had taken the time to share my experiences from these travels as I was living them. I can try to recreate them or remember them, but it's difficult to completely capture the wonder of a new experience years after it happens.
So, that brings us to the current trip. I see myself in some of the students in this class on Comparative and International Higher Education--curious and anxious to learn. Since January we have been meeting to learn about higher education around the world. One of the assignments I gave was to interview an international student about their experiences with higher education in their home country. The first time I taught this class (Fall 2008) was interesting and I think the students learned a lot, but this time was of course different as we know we would see these principles in action, up close and personal in another country.
So, little by little, we've prepared and built up for an intense ten days in the República Dominicana. And now we're here...or, as they would say: "Aquí estamos."
