UMass Boston Alumni Magazine - Fall/Winter 2008-2009 - (Page 9)

One Peninsula, Many Worlds she taught English to elementary- and junior-high-aged children, and now she plans to get a graduate degree in teaching. “I would love to go back to Africa and teach,” she says. “They appreciate it and are very respectful and focused.” Those qualities, she says ruefully, are much less apparent in the students she currently teaches in Boston. Shauna Murray traveled to Jamaica in 2006 and was so inspired that she and another participant are taking steps to establish an education-focused non-profit institution there. If these travel experiences tend to be transformative, that may be in large part because they are also a lot of work. “This is not tourism,” says Prou, reeling off a list of textbooks that students were required to read prior to and during a recent trip to Haiti. Students are typically on the go seven days a week, following a rigorous schedule of lectures, site visits, and other activities that leaves virtually no time for R&R. Once they return, they often must produce essays and other projects capturing lessons learned from their trips. That can surprise some students. “I was thinking about the chance to earn six credits in three weeks,” confesses Kim Buchanan, describing a course based on travel to Jamaica. “And getting out of the Boston winter during January.” In fact, she says, “I fell into bed exhausted by 8:00 almost every night. It was a lot of work. We had several hours in the classroom each morning, a trip in the afternoon that cemented everything we were learning, and then homework in the evening.” And, along with the work there may be a financial hurdle to clear. While some programs have modest funding that can defray a part of the cost, particularly for those with demonstrable need, students often pay for their own airfare and may have to absorb some other expenses as well. The honors program has relied on private donors to help offset some of those costs, but for virtually all programs that have an international travel component, additional funding would be welcome, and could make it possible for an even greater number of students to join with Robles when she says, “This trip really, really changed me.” Scott Leibs (MA in English ’95) is executive editor of CFO magazine in Boston and a long-time contributor to this magazine. He can be reached at SLeibs@charter.net. as appealing as overseas travel may be, students don’t necessarily need to leave campus to experience a dose of international culture—and we don’t just mean queuing up at Southern tsunami Sushi. the UMass Boston campus is, in fact, notably more cosmopolitan than a typical college, with 24% of students not holding U.S. citizenship, compared to an average of just 4% for all public universities. Between 30% and 40% of undergraduate students speak a language other than english at home, and in the aggregate more than 85 countries are represented on campus. add to that the high percentage of faculty who were born and/or studied outside the U.S. and the stage is set for any number of casual conversations that don’t revolve around the red Sox or New england weather. “When i first started in student government,” says UMass Boston Student trustee alex Kulenovic, who earned Ba in political science and is now pursuing an MS in public affairs with a concentration in international relations, “the very first complaint i got was about the flags that fly in front of the campus.” the intent of those many flags is to acknowledge all the countries that UMass Boston students hail from. But, as Kulenovic says, “there aren’t enough flagpoles to go around, so we rotate the flags that fly from them every so often.” Kulenovic emigrated with his family from what was then yugoslavia when he was 11, and he says the diversity on campus has been a huge help to him. “Very often,” he says, “we’ll be studying some aspect of recent global history in class, and there will be someone in that room, or someone i’ve met on campus, who has actually lived through what we are studying.” Sometimes, of course, he himself is that very person. UMass Boston n Members of the Honors Program group in South africa. 9

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of UMass Boston Alumni Magazine - Fall/Winter 2008-2009

UMass Boston Alumni Magazine - Fall/Winter 2008-2009 Contents UNews Oh, the Places They've Gone! "One of Those Rare Leaders" Acknowledging History, Renewing a Commonwealth Heart and Mind Indelible Images About Alumni Investing in UMass Boston A Generous Friend Alumni Calendar

UMass Boston Alumni Magazine - Fall/Winter 2008-2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.