Archived Edition: January 18, 2006 | Back to Current	Jul 31, 2010

Students abroad discover life outside of Williams
Rebecca Gordon - SENIOR EDITOR

For many students, four years at Williams provides a large array of stimulating activities and resources – from sports teams and literary societies to speakers in constant supply. Yet while many extol the virtues of the Purple Valley, students who decide to leave bucolic Williamstown for a semester return with a strong message: going away can not only lead to amazing new experiences, but can also enhance the Williams experience.

For three juniors with strikingly different, but equally positive, travel experiences, the exact destination was of relatively little importance compared to the opportunity to live in a world outside of what Williamstown has to offer.

For Melissa Bota ’07, mind-broadening experiences came while traveling in Peru, where she taught English and sports to locals, explored Incan ruins and learned about Peruvian culture and literature, first hand. “Everyone was so warm and welcoming – I miss them a lot. They just immediately adopt you as being their daughter,” Bota said of the people she met.

Though her hosts were accepting, Bota never stopped feeling like a visitor. “I was definitely in the minority, and now I think it’s more important than ever that members of the majority participate in and recognize minority movements,” she said. “Also, being female in Latin America is a huge difference – it makes you aware of the fact that the equality movement hasn’t taken hold in the majority of the world.”

Bota also found that living away from the luxuries of home made the experience of Peruvian culture more potent. Some of her most profound realizations came from comparing her experiences in Peru to her life back in the United States.

“I was a little upset when I came back [to the U.S.],” she said. “I thought, how can you complain about having to go to class when our education system is amazing? What I find remarkable is how great the Williams education system is, whereas in other places you can’t get even primary education.”

Katelyn Knox ’07 also gained perspective on her own lifestyle by traveling abroad. Through her travels in Cameroon, she learned about how outside influence, particularly American influence, affects the country’s citizens.

Particularly vivid were the impacts of tourism on the local economy and its people. “We were in a Christian town in a predominantly Muslim area of Cameroon, and there were kids there asking us to buy them pens and paper,” Knox said. “That was hard because we knew how much they needed those things, and that we had the means to provide them with them – you could tell that because it was a tourist town, they had become dependent on tourist aid for resources.”

Like Bota, too, some of Knox’s most profound realizations came from comparing Cameroon to home. For instance, a televised tennis match was probably the last thing Knox expected to see while eating cow meat on a bench outside the Ministry of Soia in Cameroon. “There were flies everywhere because the meat being cooked wasn’t refrigerated,” Knox remembers. “And then there was this weird juxtaposition in my mind between the TV and the meat … it struck me just how clean our society is.”

The experiences of Philip Arnolds ’07 are proof that students do not necessarily have to travel far from home in order to come back with an altered view of the world. After spending 12 months in the Woodshole SEA program in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (six weeks on land, six weeks at sea), Arnolds felt as if he had been a world away.

“It was such a nice escape from everything; you’re in a completely different mind state. We didn’t see land for a month – it makes you forget about the stresses and the work, and instead you just focus in on the present,” he said.

With a hands-on focus on oceanography instead of foreign cultures, the experience Arnolds had was very different from that of his peers who had chosen to live in foreign countries. Yet in this break from the typical academic setting, Arnolds found relief. “A lot of abroad programs are the same types of kids, just in a different setting, but this was different in that it was an all-encompassing experience,” he said.

One particular example was how the “watch system,” which rotated the responsibility of keeping watch over the ship between three groups of students, affected his schedule.

“You would be up for seven hours, then sleep for six, then be up for another three. It was totally different from your regular academic experience.”

The challenges of being on the water for such a prolonged period of time changed how Arnolds viewed his own capabilities: “I think that just having done it I learned a lot about myself. I know that I’m capable of doing that kind of thing now. It will help me choose what I want to do later on, and what classes I want to take.”

While they have nothing against the Purple Valley, Bota, Knox and Arnold all agree that seeing things with fresh eyes and a new perspective can be a truly rewarding experience.

Whether it is studying with Peruvian novelists, watching soap operas with Cameroonian locals or directing a sailboat from Cape Cod down to Trinidad and then up to the Virgin Islands, studying abroad can change one’s life.

“It’s great to do something that you never thought about doing,” Arnolds said. “Do something you didn’t think you could do and have an experience that will be exciting and different; something that’s not just school and work.”