Stanford student Andy Chen, a pianist who lost his heart to Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev in high school, can’t quite believe he’s going to Moscow in the fall to study Russian music, culture and politics.
Chen, ’04, went to several Overseas Studies orientation meetings last year, but concluded that he’d never be able to spend a quarter away from campus. As a physics major, he has to stick with a carefully sequenced track of courses.
Then along came Overseas Seminars—three-week, two-unit courses held before fall quarter begins—and Chen was sold. “This program was the greatest news in the world, because now I can have the experience of studying abroad without having to put a brake on my science courses.”
Chen is one of 75 undergraduates who will help launch the program in early September. Five seminars in four countries—China, Belgium, Korea and Russia—will touch on subjects ranging from local elections in China to globalization to the European Union. The program is one of a handful of innovations designed to boost the percentage of undergraduates who study overseas, currently 28 percent, to 40 percent, in part by making it easier for student-athletes and science and engineering majors to participate. Many—Chen included—will be making their first trips abroad.
In the Moscow seminar, titled Repression, Reform and Revolution: Russian Music, Culture and Politics from 1855 to 1917, Chen and his fellow students will be “connecting the very different styles of composers like Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Borodin and Glinka with the events of a very turbulent time,” says Fred Weldy, a senior lecturer in music. “And closer to the time of the revolution, we’ll look at what I call the ‘bad boy composers,’ like Prokofiev, who were producing really dissonant work.” Weldy will teach the seminar with Coit Blacker, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies and professor, by courtesy, of political science.
The new seminars seem to be a hit: Overseas Studies processed 326 applications for the 75 spots available. Blacker and Weldy had to sort through 130 applications for their 15 slots. They ended up selecting students who were well-versed in music and who also had some background in Slavic languages or the historical period. Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin sat down with the 30 students who made the short list for Korea in a Globalizing World and talked with each about her or his interest in studying in Seoul.
“The topic is so relevant to my major courses, which focus on technologies and organizations,” says Michelle Chun, ’04, a management science and technology major who was selected for Shin’s seminar. “Plus I was born in Korea but came here at age 1, and I’ve never had a chance to study its culture in an academic setting.”
Overseas Studies has enhanced its established programs, too. A four-day conference about the continued effects of World War II on Europe debuted last winter quarter and will be repeated next year. Students from Stanford centers in Moscow, Paris, Oxford, Florence and Berlin gathered in Berlin in March to present papers about the war, and then joined former University president Gerhard Casper and history professors David Kennedy, ’63, and James Sheehan, ’58, for a sobering tour of Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
“The post-war world,” says Brandon Reavis, ’03, who traveled to the Berlin conference from Oxford, “quickly came into focus when we climbed the stairs of the Reichstag, long the stage for Nazi propaganda, to view the reconstructed city through a glass dome built by the united German government.”
