<rleton’s faculty and Off-Campus Studies Office are preparing for a the upcoming study abroad programs this winter break, winter term, and spring term.
These programs include two entirely new seminars: Society, Culture and Language in Peru and Linguistics and Culture in Kyoto, Japan.
“The Peru program replaced our long-running Mexico program and will be offered every year in the spring term,” OCS Director Helena Kaufman said.
“The Kyoto program is the first OCS seminar offered by the linguistics department and is scheduled to run every other year.”
Both programs were initially proposed in January 2010; however, Kaufman said it usually takes up to two years to design, plan and recruit for a new OCS seminar.
Mike Flynn, linguistics professor and chair of the linguistics department at Carleton, created the linguistics program in Japan, which will be hosted by Doshisha University in Kyoto.
“We’re going to Japan mainly because Japan is an excellent place to do linguistics abroad,” he said. “It is safe, familiar in some ways but also profoundly distinct from America.”
Flynn is also familiar with Japan, having taught at universities in both Tokyo and Kyoto. A key component to the program, he explained, is a group of Doshiba students called the “Doshiba Peers,” who will be associated with the program for its duration.
With nearly three-fourths of all Carleton students studying off-campus, study abroad programs are certainly popular.
In the class of 2011 alone, 70 percent of all students participated in 132 different programs in 52 countries, visiting every continent except for Antarctica.
Part of the appeal of study-abroad programs is the trimester system, which allows students to study abroad for one trimester without falling too far behind in classes on campus. The trimester system also makes it more feasible for students to study abroad more than once. Last year, 403 students participated in an off-campus program; this year, that number is even higher.
Kaufman estimates that 423 students will study off-campus this school year.
The majority of them will participate in one of the 17 Carleton seminars that have been planned for the year.
This summer, students studied literature and culture in Ireland and economics in Cambridge; this fall, two programs — Spanish Studies in Madrid and German Language and Literature in Berlin — are currently running.
In addition, over winter break, students will visit three different countries on Carleton-sponsored programs, studying literature and faith in Israel, comparative agroecology in China and socioeconomic and cultural development in Brazil.
Ten additional Carleton programs, four in the winter and six in the spring, will bring students to nine different countries and six different continents.