Allegheny College is expanding its study abroad program offerings to provide more opportunities for students in a wider variety of majors.
Faculty members traveled to different locations worldwide to find programs that best fit the college curriculum so that students could receive credits for their study abroad experience. The new program locations include Stockholm, London, Copenhagen in Denmark; Cork and Dublin in Ireland; and Florence, Siena and Rome in Italy.
Assistant Dean for Global Education Brita Doyle has been leading the effort to add more programs since March 2022 and explained how locations and programs were chosen.
“These programs fill, I think, a variety of academic and regional gaps in our existing programming that we’ve had for some time,” Doyle said. “For example, you know, nationally, the U.K. is the number one destination for U.S. study abroad students, London being one of the most popular destinations for U.S. students and Allegheny didn’t have a program there.”
The programs located in London are meant to place English and theater students in a dynamic city while also filling gaps in the academic offerings available, according to Doyle.
“Italy is the number two destination nationally for U.S. students studying away, and Allegheny also never has had a semester-long program there,” Doyle said. “The programs we selected in Italy — specifically, a program in Rome is geared to help our Business and Economics students to be able to have an opportunity abroad.”
The programs in Florence are focused on business and the programs in Siena are for computer science students. The programs selected are in English in order to address language barriers that may arise.
Assistant Professor of Art Paula Burleigh was invited along with many other educators to attend a program by Geographic Information Systems, in which educators around the world could explore their campuses in Stockholm and Copenhagen. The purpose of the event was to evaluate how the institutions can be integrated into home institutions.
“I think it is a really amazing program, it is academically rigorous but also there’s just an amazing array of cultural opportunities at both campuses in Stockholm and in Copenhagen,” Burleigh said. “I was particularly interested to visit and observe the courses where the curricula related to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.”
The curriculum Burleigh observed included courses on sex work, constructions of masculinity, transgender identity and feminism. Additionally, the curriculum offers courses in a broad range of liberal arts topics.
“They have classes in STEM, they have classes in art, other humanities, disciplines in history,” Burleigh said. “They do a really nice job integrating site visits and travel into their programming so you will go to local area museums, you will explore the cities.”
Associate Professor and Chair of Computer and Information Science Janyl Jumadinova was a part of the computer science program selection which is located in Australia, England, Ireland, Italy and Spain.
“One thing we noticed is that we didn’t really have anyone other than maybe one or two students, here and there going abroad,” Jumadinova said. “When we started looking into why, we saw that the programs that we had on the books didn’t really have a computer science curriculum.”
Jumadinova said it is really important for everyone to have access to the opportunity to gain different perspectives on the world and different cultures.
“I think it helps all of us become more well-rounded,” Jumadinova said. “It promotes some of the values at Allegheny, which is building diverse viewpoints in students and being able to incorporate them.”
The process of selecting programs included mapping their courses into categories and basing it on the kinds of courses students typically take during their second or third year according to Jumadinova.
“There were a lot of liberal arts-type of schools that were looked at abroad that unfortunately did not have enough course offering to make it a feasible program for us,” Jumadinova said. “The other thing we looked at in terms of elective courses was whether they were offering something we don’t offer because we are a relatively small department.”
In order for students to gain approval to study off campus in the fall, they must submit their application on the Global Education website by Feb. 20 at 5 p.m.