As college students, many of us are used to having to figure most things out on our own. That can make it a huge undertaking when you’re trying to find a study abroad program. Luckily though, there are many on-campus resources and people who are more than happy to help you in the search for a program that’s perfect for you!
During my search, I didn’t actually utilize any of the resources available to me, and that made my experience so much more difficult than it had to be. I spent hours combing through the Clemson terradotta app (which is not the most user-friendly, mind you) and trying a million different search combinations to find a program that interested me when in reality, all I had to do was set up a meeting with my advisor and see what she recommended.
Photo Credit: Clemson University Academic Success Center
In my opinion, the best course of action to take if you’re interested in going abroad is to speak with your advisor! They have the latest scoop on all of the awesome opportunities that fit your major and your interests, so they are best suited to give you some guidance. Not only are they knowledgeable in all things your major, but they can also help you pick the best program for your remaining course list. This is the most important facet of the study abroad search! You want to make sure that you’re fulfilling your requirements while also choosing something that interests you, and this is where your advisor comes in.
Some other useful resources on campus include Clemson Abroad, which holds Study Abroad 101 meetings throughout the year in which students learn all about what steps they need to take, what kind of stuff to bring, and a plethora of other important information. You can find all of these meetings on the Clemson University Calendar.
Devin visiting the Oland Lighthouse with her study abroad group last summer in Sweden.
You can also wander around campus and find half a million flyers with potential study abroad opportunities. In fact, you can check out the AG Quad buildings and Hendrix to find flyers I made to advertise Sustainable Cities in Scandinavia, Clemson’s only faculty-led program in Sweden.
Now let’s get into all the different varieties of study abroad opportunities! Being an out of state student myself, one of the best parts about Clemson’s study abroad programs is that you get in-state tuition when you go on a faculty-led study abroad to one of Clemson’s partner universities, which are located all over the world! When you decide on a faculty led program, you also avoid the hassle of having to find accommodation, organizing your own travel, and that of transferring credits.
If none of the Clemson faculty directed programs interest you and you want to do a third party program, there are so many of those to choose from as well, and they have their own unique benefits. Although you will have to get credits approved by Clemson faculty and go through the credit transfer process, there are way more third party opportunities than Clemson faculty-directed programs, so you may be able to find one that fits you best. Depending on the program you choose, you will be more deeply immersed in the culture of the country you go to and have more options for courses.
Exchange programs are another awesome way to go abroad. I have had many friends come and go as exchange students throughout my time at Clemson, and I gotta say, they were some of the coolest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting! Basically, you just pay the amount of your current Clemson tuition, then you switch spots with a student at one of Clemson’s partner universities, and bam you’re in a new country at a new school studying!
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Considering a study abroad opportunity this summer? Check out the Study Abroad Fair on Wednesday, February 7 from 10 am to 3 pm at the Hendrix Center.
Clemson youth development researcher and Associate Professor Dr. Ed Bowers has always had a natural curiosity about other people and cultures, particularly why people do what they do.
Clemson youth development researcher and Associate Professor Dr. Ed Bowers.
“I’ve always been interested in how people think and act in different environments and situations, and how the cultural context they live in can influence their beliefs and behaviors,” he says.
That curiosity is taking him all over the world. Over the course of his career so far, he’s visited more a dozen countries and taught in Dublin as part of an international service program, experiencing different cultures and perspectives wherever he goes.
When he visits a new place, he pays close attention to things most travelers are not likely to typically consider, such as what strengths young people need to develop in order to succeed, and how they may differ from what success may look like at home.
“It’s a habit at this point. People and our motivations are more complex than you might think,” he says. “For example, if you’re living in a remote area without ready access to core services such as education, health care or transportation, you’re going to see different measures of success than someone who is living in a major urban center.”
Dr. Bowers carries that curiosity to his research, which asks similar questions, but through a focus on positive youth development, and how youth-adult relationships can influence what goes right in the lives of children and adolescents. His work helps us figure out what every parent asks themselves at some point – why did my child do that? And do they have the characteristics and support they need to be successful in life?
His research also focuses on the strengths of youth, instead of negative behaviors. Bowers says this is because even though there is a widespread belief that the teen years are marked by ‘storm and stress,’ most teenagers are actually doing relatively well.
“Youth do make bad decisions, and there are reasons for that, but they also give to charities, care about people, and have sympathy and empathy for others,” he says. “Teenagers can contribute in positive ways to their communities. Building on these youth strengths rather than focusing on their deficits is a more effective way to promote thriving in young people.”
In 2015, Dr. Bowers and several of his academic colleagues explored measures that can help define positive skills and growth in a book they edited together about promoting positive youth development. The book shares a model that people working in positive youth development commonly use to measure a child’s strengths, called the Five Cs – competence, confidence, caring, compassion and character.
Dr. Bowers helped contribute to that model by examining youth responses from across the country to create a measure focused on what a thriving teenager looks like in a community, asking questions about skills or things that they do that demonstrate success.
Dr. Bowers is applying positive youth development models in other countries and environments to determine how measures of youth success may need to be adjusted, depending on where youth live.
Character, for example, can be measured by doing the right thing, having integrity and valuing diversity. Caring, on the other hand, is assessed by whether or not the teenager is bothered by seeing bad things happen to people, or if they want to step in and help.
Dr. Bowers is now working with colleagues in other universities and community organizations to apply that model to youth in other countries and environments, so they can determine how measures of success may need to be adjusted, depending on where and how youth live.
“For example, when measuring competence, a First Nations teenager living in a remote area in Canada’s Northwest Territories needs to have certain skills to succeed that would make no sense to a suburban kid in Boston,” he says. “We’re drilling deeper into the measures to find out exactly what skills are necessary in their specific contexts, to ensure the model can adapt to reflect their unique situations.”
How does one find out what measures work for certain groups of people? According to Dr. Bowers, the first step is asking them. Right now, he’s working with Maasai Mara University in Kenya, Oregon State University, and the University of South Carolina on a Templeton World Charity Foundation funded project to develop a new tool that youth workers will be able use to assess character strengths among Kenyan youth. The project is one of only 14 funded from over 150 applications spanning 55 countries around the globe, and involves interviews with 60 youth and 15 adults to get a sense of what measures are most important for youth living in different environments.
“Within Nairobi, there are teenagers living more traditional lives and street kids who are working towards very different ideas of success,” he says. “The challenge is to develop a model that can be tailored to specifically measure what skills and supports they need to be successful in their specific context of their shared community.”
The instrument they develop will be tested on a sample of 450 youths to establish its validity, relevance and ease of use. Dr. Bowers says the impact of this new tool will be far-reaching.
“This project is not just building a tool for one community,” he says. “It’s also building capacity for youth workers and scholars to conduct high quality research and become a hub for youth development in that area of the African continent.”
Ed Bowers (back row, right) in Senegal last June with student-athletes and staff that participated in a school build trek organized by buildOn.
Dr. Bowers is also using other opportunities to identify new avenues for applied research to benefit young people. In June he traveled to Senegal with a group of Clemson student-athletes and staff on a school construction project organized by buildOn, a non-profit organization that constructs a new school every two days in some of the economically poorest countries around the world. Now he’s working with YDL program graduate and buildOn Community Engagement Manager Aled Hollingworth to apply their experiences to the development of innovative service-learning opportunities. Next fall, Dr. Bowers also plans to co-teach an international virtual exchange course with a colleague in Vietnam. The course will bring together students from Clemson with students at Ho Chi Minh City Open University to explore the role of digital media in the lives of young people from different cultures.
He says that projects like the Kenyan initiative, service-learning study abroad experiences like the Senegal trip, and virtual exchanges are key to gathering the input needed to tailor youth development measurement tools for global communities. These experiences are equally important for students looking to enter the youth development field.
“Finding ways to get students out in these different cultures conducting field work is the best way to build their skills to see development from a systems perspective, extend our reach, and continue to build capacity in communities they visit,” he says. “Exchanges can also make a big difference, by connecting youth development students from other countries with our students to engage in discussions about best practices, and then identify ways to best promote thriving in diverse communities. Our goal is to encourage positive youth development in a global society.”
Clemson PRTM faculty and graduate students on their trip to South Africa.
Clemson Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management (PRTM) faculty and graduate students were recently invited to South Africa to share their expertise, research human/wildlife experiences in Africa’s longest standing national park and explore new potential collaborations.
The group, led by Department Chair Wayne Freimund and consisting of Associate Chair Lori Dickes, faculty members Lauren Duffy and Aby Sene-Harper, and graduate students E’Lisha Fogle and Temitope Arogundade, took part in the Insaka international research symposium about how Africa can best meet the multiple societal and ecological challenges that come with transformative conservation, conducted a visitor research project for Kruger National Park and explored the possibility of a promising new collaborative project focused on Garden Route National Park.
The Insaka Symposium
The Insaka Symposium brought together experts in a wide variety of disciplines, such as social science, tourism, human rights, community development and environmental science to try to better understand and address rapid social and ecological changes in South Africa. According to Freimund, the multidisciplinary makeup of the group provides a richer and more thorough understanding of challenges throughout the country.
“South Africa’s conservation issues are complex, multidimensional and require all hands on deck, with everyone working together to find workable solutions,” says Freimund. “It’s rewarding to work as part of a collective of international leaders in their fields, collaborating on possible solutions we can share with the country’s decision makers.”
Clemson PRTM Chair Wayne Freimund speaking at the Insane Symposium in South Africa in June 2019.
Most of the team presented at the symposium, with Freimund and Dickes delivering keynote speeches. Their presentations shared findings from research conducted by the department in national parks throughout the United States and parts of Africa, and applied those learnings to a South African context. PRTM’s different areas of focus, including parks, community recreation, youth development, tourism and public administration, makes it well-suited to address the rapidly evolving social and ecological challenges the region is facing.
“We had a great scientific exchange and social capital building experience at the symposium, with the collective experiencing the breadth and depth of what Clemson had to offer and how a department like ours can fit into these large-scale problems in a constructive way,” continued Freimund.
The collective is now working together to apply for a National Science Foundation network collaboration grant involving the Insaka Consortia, Clemson and Montana universities, and potentially the University of Botswana, the Nelson Mandela University and other African partners. The grant proposal is focused on the Kafue River basin in Zambia, part of the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Trans Frontier Park, which is the largest in the world.
Kruger National Park
After the symposium, the PRTM group traveled to Kruger National Park, one of the longest standing parks in Africa, to develop a study on challenges associated with human interaction with wildlife.
Clemson PRTM faculty and graduate students researched visitor wildlife encounters, such as this one with a female lion, at Kruger National Park.
International and domestic tourism to the park is increasing, which brings a number of opportunities to the region, but also creates a tension between the park’s natural space and the humans wanting to experience it. Wildlife is migratory, making it difficult to create experiences for tourists. Human interaction can also pose challenges when animals feel at risk.
The group conducted research in the park to get a sense of wildlife interactions from a visitor’s perspective, and to better understand the complexities – and possible solutions for – human and wildlife experiences over time. The group is developing an app-based experience sampling method, where visitors send data throughout the day during their visit that describes where they are, what they are doing, how they feel about it, their perceived quality of their experience, among other questions. This will give researchers a better understanding of how to better manage incidents and create a better code of ethics for visitors, while also taking steps to enhance their visitor experience.
“Right now, the visitor experience at the park is based on the luck of the draw. For example, you could have an awesome experience of nature if your car drives beside a lion next to the road, or you could stumble into a long traffic jam if dozens of people get there before you,” says Freimund. “The first is a very positive experience. The second isn’t. Developing a visitor app for the park can help flag some of these issues and help help us better understand how the positive and negative episodes affect the overall experience and impression of the park.”
Garden Route National Park
The group’s final visit was to Garden Route National Park, near the town of George, where they explored the possibility of a new research collaboration with the Sustainability Research Unit at Nelson Mandela University, the Knsyna Basin Project and South Africa National Parks.
The group is exploring a number of key opportunities and challenges facing the park and region, such as municipal park development, tourism as an economic generator, youth development and conservation.
“The area’s national parks are open access, similar to national forests throughout the United States,” says Freimund. “There are opportunities to help visitors explore the health and cultural benefits of nature and expand the park’s recreational use and community engagement, while also managing its conservation. We have a great deal of experience in managing those issues, making a partnership a good fit.”
After a successful first meeting, the collective is working together to explore potential opportunities for collaboration, including research projects, student and faculty exchanges and a possible visit to Clemson. The group has struck a committee to look for ways to facilitate an exchange moving forward.
Watch the video below for more pictures of the group’s experiences!
A group of Clemson undergraduate students are spending five weeks in Kalmar, Sweden, this summer to learn about what makes the area one of the most sustainable regions in the world.
From July 10 to August 13, the students will live and study at the Linnaeus University Summer Academy in Kalmar, where they will explore topics such as sustainable shipping, farming, water treatment, water, energy, transportation, infrastructure, local foods, environmental impacts, business and economics, policy and ecology.
Students bicycling by the Swedish coast during last year’s study abroad program.
The program responds to a new global environment, with governments, businesses and other organizations across the globe considering how they can be more sustainable. Sustainability impacts a wide variety of management issues, such as overdevelopment, environmental issues, municipal services – such as water, trash, transportation and power – public health and high-quality nutrition, access to green space and concerns of over tourism.
“The concept of sustainability is increasingly vital for students to understand regardless of their study focus,” says Dickes. “Students participating in this study abroad program will have a unique opportunity to experience a city that is at the top of the sustainability game, and to consider how they can apply these lessons to their studies and their communities in the United States.”
Sweden consistently tops the RobecoSAM Country Sustainability Ranking, a semiannual survey that ranks 65 countries based on several environmental, social and governance indicators. The country’s green technology industry produces revenues of approximately $3.5 billion annually and employs more than 40,000 people.
The study abroad program includes field work, class field trips, case study sites throughout the region, and research and group projects with students from other universities. The program uses an integrated systems and interdisciplinary approach to teach students how to learn about and consider research, behavior and social norms around sustainability.
Students are placed in teams to complete group projects, and will also expected to write blog posts and share presentations about what they’ve learned on a wide variety of sustainability topics. When they’re not in the classroom, they’ll also be given the option of experiencing Swedish culture in a different way, by participating in cultural and extracurricular activities, attending lectures by internationally-renowned speakers and experiencing other popular recreational activities in the area, such as biking, hiking, kayaking, canoeing and swimming.
Students learn about several different sustainability topics throughout their month in Sweden.
Students will also study and assess best practices from local, regional, national and international perspectives, with an emphasis on the transfer of knowledge across regions. Dickes says that this is particularly important, as it helps students understand how the scale of a sustainability initiative can impact its planning, implementation and ongoing management to reflect specific regional, social and cultural needs.
“Sustainability is often complex and culturally-influenced, so there is no single, one-size-fits-all approach to solutions,” says Dickes. “Being able to see what is working in Sweden and what challenges they’ve faced, while also being immersed in that culture, can help students understand why certain initiatives were framed or developed in a certain way for that specific population.”
The ability to consider the cultural context for a sustainability initiative, including an understanding of what motivates people to change patterns of behavior, can help students better adapt and apply best practices to challenges faced in the United States and throughout North America. The program also enrolls students from universities around the world, helping its participants see sustainability initiatives through the lens of other cultures, and to discuss sustainability experiences through a global perspective.
Dickes feels that having students from different areas of study – and different countries – take part in the program reflects the need for every sector with a stake in the issue to come together to find multi-faceted solutions.
“Because sustainability is a broad topic with many dimensions, it requires an interdisciplinary lens and understanding of the breadth of topics that fall under this broad umbrella,” she says. “We need many different types of academic and professional backgrounds to work together if we’re going to solve the complex environmental, social, organizational and policy problems of the world.”
Last week, a delegation from Zambia’s Copperbelt University and its Governing Council visited Clemson University to broaden the scope of their existing relationship and explore new opportunities to work together in the future.
Members of Clemson’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management Department met with the Zambian delegation on May 2.
The visit reciprocated a trip to Zambia last February from Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management Department (PRTM) Chair Wayne Freimund and PRTM faculty members for similar discussions.
“Our university management made a decision that this is the right time to visit, so we can show our colleagues that we appreciate the relationship, and would like to find ways to entrench and strengthen it through new areas of collaboration,” says Dr. Jacob Mwitwa, who spearheaded the trip.
The delegates met with several different parts of the university during their two-day stay, learning more about Clemson University’s land grant mission, its existing research in Africa and academic and research work of interest to the delegation, including agricultural and natural resource programs and the university’s greenhouses, packaging and agricultural science laboratory facilities, the Clemson Experimental Forest and the School of Architecture.
The Delegation visits Clemson University’s School of Architecture.
“Although we already have a successful partnership with these universities, and have already done a substantial amount of work and research together, our focus has largely been on parks, recreation and tourism,” says Freimund. “The delegation’s visit creates an invaluable opportunity to expand what has been a successful and enriching partnership for everyone involved to other parts of the university, creating a more fulsome array of potential projects in the future.”
Mwitwa says that international partnerships between academic institutions are increasingly important, as many major issues require a global lens. “If someone is teaching about international development, conservation, tourism or climate change, a primary focus of your work is going to be with other countries,” he says. “Although it’s important to understand science from a local perspective, having a global perspective enriches the conversation. After all, science doesn’t have political boundaries.”
