| Students mull options at Study Abroad Fair
BY SALLY ACHARYA
Photo by Jeff Watts
Stephanie Simoni, who studied abroad in Australia, shares her insights.
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No, you don’t have to speak Twi to study in Ghana. But yes, you need at least two years of Spanish for Madrid. No, there’s no alcohol in the conservative Arab emirate of Sharjah. But yes, there’s an active student life and some pristine beaches—and for those who like the club scene (and more populous beaches), cosmopolitan Dubai
is only 20 minutes down the highway. AU students who have studied abroad volunteered to sit in the hot sun last week—hot, at least, for students like Allison Meredith ’06, recently returned from Scotland—and share their experiences with others mulling the many options available through AU Abroad. There were also representatives of foreign universities and exchange programs at AU Abroad’s annual Study Abroad Fair, which featured 84 sites in 48 countries. Some 800 students will study abroad this year alone, and over 60 percent of all AU students will study abroad before they graduate. Bethany Arnold ’06 was so enthusiastic about her experience at AU’s Study Abroad enclave in Brussels that she volunteered the minute she received an e-mail message about the fair. “I loved it so much, I just wanted to talk about it,” she says. “It was really overwhelming at first,” Arnold confesses of her first days in the capital of the European Union. “You think, ‘I will never understand how all this works!’” But after visiting the major European institutions, interning, traveling, and studying “in the middle of everything,” she’s so at home in Brussels that she now says, “I pretty much consider myself a European Union expert after this.” Students who’d like to feel like experts on the Middle East dropped by the table for the American University at Sharjah. Almost all the inquiries came from students who wanted to learn or enhance their Arabic and hoped to be immersed in the Gulf Arab culture. “It’s a chance to really know the Gulf,” said Michael Hedge of the AU Sharjah liaison office.
Photo by Jeff Watts
Students consider studying abroad.
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Sharjah is one of 45 partner universities in countries that include Argentina, Australia, Ireland, Poland, Turkey, and many other places, where students enroll in regular classes alongside their host country counterparts. AU Abroad also runs “enclaves,” where they study together in a separate program in sites that include Belgium, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, and Kenya. Students can also select programs run by international education organizations—Costa Rica, Ghana, and Russia are among the countries available in this way—or can take language immersion courses, internships, and summer courses. Freshman Megan Moulton was perusing the tables in search of an opportunity to teach overseas. She’s been to Thailand, so she’s narrowed her search down to three as-yet-unseen continents—South America, Africa, or Europe. That cuts her options down by half—to some 42 different sites. Fortunately, she has a few years to decide. |
