Penn to offer four new summer abroad programs

The Parthenon, the Berlin Wall and some of the worlds’ best beaches are on the map for students going abroad this summer.

Despite declining enrollments, Penn will be expanding summer abroad to Tel Aviv, Havana, Athens, Berlin and Rotterdam.

This is largest expansion of summer abroad in recent history. “We added new programs because faculty approached us and said ‘we want to take an opportunity this summer to have a really unique educational experience with students’,” Director of Non-Degree Programs Eli Lesser said. “Each of our faculty who chose these locations have had previous and past histories in these locations and really see it as a unique opportunity to teach students in the place where their material happened.”

The Athens course taught by professor Jeremy McInerney, for example, is a seminar based on the Archaeology of Ancient Greece that incorporates travel to archeological sites with campus-based lectures and research.

“The opportunity is to stand and walk in Athens,” Lesser said. “[McInerney] can describe a sacrificial alter in Delphi, but then to stand in Delphi actually at the alter in front it and look at the various things in it is a totally different experience.”

The Havana course will overlap with the 2015 Havana Bienal exhibition of international contemporary art. Students will visit the exhibition, tour artists’ studios, collections, architectural monuments and historical sites and learn about the architecture and public culture of Cuba.

“Obviously we couldn’t have picked a better time to go to Cuba,” Lesser said. “If you speak to professor [Gwendolyn] Shaw what you’ll learn is that she’s had an amazing experience in recent years in Cuba. And the first thing that came to her mind was ‘I want to bring students here. I want to let Penn undergraduate students experience what this is like and to see the opportunities that exist from an artistic point of view.’”

Like the Cuba program, the Tel Aviv courses come at a time in which Israel’s politics are being discussed on the international stage. “The courses are really focused on contemporary Israel,” professor Peter Decherney, who is running the program, said. “Israel is the start-up nation, it has an amazing tech industry, all the San Francisco venture capital firms have offices in Tel Aviv. There’s just so much going on. So students will take courses and have the opportunity to do internships afterward.”

Decherney said he is teaching in the Middle East because the region is critical to understanding Internet policy. “My course, which is Global Internet Policy, is focused more on kinds of issues that are really relevant to the Middle East generally now. So cyberwar, how networks are managed, how things like Twitter and other social networks function under different kinds of policies.”

The final new summer abroad course in Berlin and Rotterdam is a shorter 10-day program focused on long-standing traditions of German and Dutch sustainability, environmentalism and policymaking. It is among many more short-term, experiential programs that the University has been spearheading to expand students’ global outreach, according to Provost Vincent Price.

If past years’ enrollment rates are any reflection of this year’s summer abroad participation, however, these new courses will not get much traction. As a result of an announcement of changes in financial aid practices prior to summer 2014, at least 28 students withdrew from studying abroad with Penn.

“There’s been a decline in attendance and a decline in overall summer enrollments,” Lesser said. “I hope that will change.”

The new financial aid practices only give aid to those with the highest financial need — those who receive aid during the academic year are not necessarily eligible. Director of Financial Aid Joel Carstens said that while the change in practices has resulted in fewer grants, they are reasonable. He explained that Penn is the only Ivy League school with an aid program that offers summer grants to undergraduates taking summer courses or studying abroad.

Program coordinators for summer abroad programs, however, are not so sure. Penn-in-Venice, Penn-in-Madrid and Penn-in-Grahamstown directors all noted decreased summer abroad enrollment due to these financial aid changes.

“We are running the risk that the ‘internationalization’ [becomes] a social and economic privilege, not a mission for the entire collectivity of our students,” Fabio Finotti, director of Penn-in-Venice, told The Daily Pennsylvanian in an email in April 2014.

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