When Kevin Brown signed up for a 12-day trip on a boat cruising the coast of Turkey, he figured he'd get to visit ruins of ancient cities and work on his creative writing skills during stops in secluded coves along the way. What the Stanford senior didn't expect is that he would have the 80-foot yacht virtually to himself.
Brown was enrolled in English 90A: Creative Writing in the Mediterranean, one of three courses Stanford offers as part of its summer study abroad curriculum. This summer, Brown was the only student in the new Turkey program, proof that it's not as easy to control conditions overseas as it is on campus. Although there were many inquiries about the trip, organizers say unrest in the region following the arrest of a Kurdish separatist leader scared off many potential participants. (About a dozen people attended the same trip through Stanford's continuing studies program last year.) "We don't see this as a long-term setback," says Roberta Bassett, assistant dean for Stanford's summer session. "This is a lesson learned. For us this is a whole new branch of programming."
A second new course offered this summer -- Alpine Archaeology in the Swiss and Italian Alps -- attracted 14 participants, half of them Stanford students and half mentors. Students learned basic archaeological techniques by surveying, mapping, excavating and analyzing artifacts at the ruins of a temple to Jupiter. The trips to Turkey and Switzerland join one long-time offering -- the Stanford University-Peking University Program. Participants receive a year's worth of Chinese lessons in just nine weeks -- five at Stanford and four in Beijing. Thirty students attended this summer.
It used to be that summer was a time for relaxing and perhaps making a little extra money. Not anymore. "It's only recently that students see summer more and more as an important time to invest in their academic careers," says Bassett. Now they can do that and see the world, too.
