Destination: Disaster

Mina Hoffman / Claremont Student

By Amruti Borad, Carey Jackson
Staff Writer

For the first day of O’Week all of the new members of St. Marks (the international students included) as well as the new freshman, were lined up and bombarded with a variety of nauseating and extremely sticky and gooey substances. I was pelted with rotten tomatoes, squid guts, eggs, vinegar, fish oil, vegemite, honey, baking flour and I was being sprayed with a garden house. I was humiliated, yelled at and shoved. I was told to kneel for 2 hours and as I was kneeling I was still being pelted with verbal insults and was being sprayed with the most foul smelling fish oils. After we were done bowing to the school elected officials dressed as devils, we were paraded around north Adelaide while still wearing our clothing that, by now, had hardened in the sun. Meanwhile, the entire administration took part and watched. The Dean sat idly; the Head Master sat next to her while the Assistant Dean threw eggs.

-Elliot Scher (Pitzer, ’07)

Can you imagine going to a foreign country for the first time and being disgraced without any warning, and then being told that this particular act was a cultural norm?

For most students who study abroad, there is a period of adjustment while they deal with homesickness and culture shock. However, for a small percentage of students studying abroad, what they experienced was a little more than culture shock. Elliot Scher, who participated in Pitzer’s study abroad program at St. Marks College in Adelaide, South Australia, is a case in point.

Although Scher had an “overall awesome experience,” he wished that better communication had existed between Pitzer and St. Marks prior to his departure. If study abroad administration at Pitzer had known about and informed him of St. Marks’ traditional hazing ritual, Scher says that he would have stayed at another university.

Many students decide to study abroad because they want to experience a different culture; they want to know what life is like outside of the quite sheltered and privileged United States. But, sometimes it’s not possible to truly appreciate a study abroad experience if there is a lack of crucial communication between study abroad coordinators and the countries with exchange programs.

Such was the case for Pitzer senior Christine Keelin. Keelin, one of the first students to attend Joint Science’s new study abroad program in Ireland, encountered problems right from the start. Upon her arrival to Ireland, she found herself stranded, miles away from her apartment because she hadn’t been provided with the exact address and instructions for how to get there. Without a cell phone and with no working pay phones in sight, she was only able to reach her destination because someone let her borrow his cell phone.

After settling in, she met with more problems and deficiencies on Pitzer’s part where academics were concerned. The International Office of her college in Ireland attempted to help her with questions that only Pitzer’s program director could answer, but she had no communication with the director of the program at the Keck Science Center. She emailed the director multiple times with questions, but he would either not respond or say that he “didn’t know what to do for her.” This left her without support from Joint Science.

And, though she enjoyed her classes, she found the biotechnology part of the course, which was advertised as the drawing point of the program, worthless. Instead of helping her academically, she said, the Dean of Science would just “talk at her” for an hour, rather than conducting any real wound-care research. In addition, since she was the only student from the Claremont Colleges to attend this program, there were no college-sponsored activities available for her to attend (Pitzer College normally sets up such activities).

In the end, she had to leave the program early due to a family emergency, and when she tried to contact the director at Joint Science, he did not respond. He still has not responded to her, and continues to fail to respond to other students that are interested in attending one of the three science programs in Finland, Germany, and Ireland.

Overall, she said, “The program ended up being wonderful because of the Irish people, but Pitzer totally let me down.”

For Moe Macarow and Nari Darst, Scripps seniors, a combination of bureaucratic, academic, and social factors lead to an early withdrawal from their program, SIT’s Sexuality and Gender Identity in Amsterdam, Netherlands. “It was a confluence of events,” Moe said of the decision to leave the program early. “I felt that there was something deeply wrong with the program from the first day.”

Seven months after applying to SIT as a couple and being told that doing so was acceptable, Macarow and Darst were informed that it “was not fine” for them to live and attend classes together. Apparently, SIT directors didn’t think that studying abroad with a partner provided the alone-ness typically experienced by students studying abroad, But, since it was too late to switch programs, Macarow and Darst put up a fight and were able to get a homestay together.

However, the academic directors made it clear that they did not approve. One pulled Darst aside during the first days of classes and informed her that if she and Macarow broke up (“And you will break up,” he said), the two should keep the breakup quiet and not tell anyone about it. Macarow and Darst were also placed into different classes because, according to Macarow, the directors “wanted Nari and I to be apart as much as possible.”

Aside from being somewhat sadistic, the academic directors “were completely unqualified.” “One of the directors’ qualifications was basically being a gay man in Amsterdam,” said Macarow. After a little research, Macarow and Darst also discovered that the other director “may not even have had a Masters in Education.” A third director, the theory professor, was nearly always absent.

The program, advertised as a semester of upper-level theory seminars and research, turned out to be an academic joke. “At least half of the people had never taken a gender studies class before,” Macarow said. Lectures consisted of the unqualified directors spouting off their personal opinions on gender and sexuality.

Because of the seminar nature of the program, the academic rigor of the course varies from semester to semester based on the students’ familiarity with the material, something Macarow and Darst weren’t warned about in advance. “Valerie [Eastman, the Scripps Director of Off-Campus Study] told us that [the academic rating] was low after we got back . . . I felt that the academics were non-existent,” asserted Macarow. All in all, the experience was “a waste of time.”

Other factors contributing to ultimate withdrawal from the program included a nightmare of a homestay with a “psychopathic” host, who spied on them (even went through their trash), made them cook multi-course meals for him almost every night, and who wanted to make a sex-slave of another homestay. Additionally, though they were told that Amsterdam was a city tolerant of LGBTQ identities, in Macarow’s experience, the city “was definitely not queer-friendly.”

In fact, Macarow was surprised that she and Darst stayed with the program as long as they did—two and a half months. However, Macarow stated that if she’d known that if she and Darst withdrew earlier, they could have gotten some of their money back, they would certainly have done so. “I lost an entire semester’s worth of financial aid and wouldn’t have if I’d left early.”

Without concrete information about which withdrawal dates to heed—Scripps’ or SIT’s—Macarow and Darst were also forced to suppress their transcripts because they passed the withdrawal date for their program.

Over all, Macarow said, “In terms of information [before you go abroad], you need to know financial details and academic dates. Scripps should be giving out something more definitive than pamphlets on culture shock.”

Additionally, upon their return to Scripps, Macarow and Darst have not been acknowledged as having gone abroad by Scripps Off-Campus Study. They were not invited to the Study Abroad dinners nor asked to fill out forms detailing their experience for future students interested in the program.

Avraham Bayer, Pitzer senior who attended the college’s program at Antioch University in India, wasn’t disappointed with the program’s bureaucracy or the treatment he received while in India. However, the program was just a lot more intense that he’d expected. The result, according to Bayer, was “stress,” “lack of sleep,” and “painful confrontation with [himself].”

Luckily, despite these physical and intellectual challenges, Bayer’s time abroad was ultimately “deeply fulfilling and intensely educational.” “The stress . . . made it wonderful. [It was] amazing, but for those who are sincere,” he said. Now that it’s over, he doesn’t envy those who attended less intensive programs: “Others had a blast, but it was just partying in another country.”

For Bayer, the academic and emotional growth he experienced under the pressure of his program was worth it, though he didn’t expect that pressure. “My experience was incredibly wonderful,” he said. “It just wasn’t fun.”

And what do the study abroad coordinators have to say on the subject of negative study abroad experiences?

One of Pitzer’s External Studies coordinators, Carol Brandt, had some different opinions on what makes a study abroad experience “good” or “bad.”

She feels it is difficult to establish a “bad study abroad experience” without knowing what is meant by “bad” and because each individual may have a different idea of what constitutes that judgement.  “Some students have very challenging experiences but learn a lot. Some have very enjoyable experiences and learn very little about the cultures in which they studied or themselves.”

“Liking is not the issue, learning is the issue,” she stated. “Enjoying a program is not the goal of study abroad, learning something about another culture and another way of seeing the world is.”

Brandt emphasized the role of the student in creating his or her own experience. From her point of view, “the only bad study abroad program is when a student returns and talks about how . . . little their language improved because they spent all their time with other English speakers, brags about things they did that were completely culturally inappropriate and insensitive, or have only pictures of touristy sites or drunken escapades to show for their experience.” 

On the other hand, she said, “A good study abroad experience is one that facilitated moments to savor like a conversation over tea with a host mom . . . laughing at yourself over cultural mistakes, a realization about what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes, mastering a language sufficiently to communicate with people you meet, and perhaps making a difference by behaving in culturally appropriate ways that helped to dispel the negative perceptions and stereotypes of Americans.”

Harvey Mudd’s study abroad advisor, Rhonda Chiles, stated simply that she has “yet to speak with a student who had a negative experience to the point that they would either not recommend studying abroad or a specific program.” 

Director of Off-Campus Study Nicole Hamon of Claremont McKenna College had a similar response. She explained that out of 145 students abroad every year, “99% say that their experience was life changing and that they wish they could have stayed.” 

The Off-Campus Study office tries ensure that students are making the right decisions for themselves through organization and monitoring, she says, by requiring that students attend “advising sessions” before deciding on a country to study in.

Other off-campus study directors were unavailable for comment.

While study abroad directors may not be ready to discuss negative study abroad experiences in much depth, this may be because, like several students initially approached for this article, some students are afraid to say how they really felt about their programs. What can be taken from both the directors and from those students who are comfortable with speaking out is that good communication between schools, students and staff in both countries about all aspects of a program is the key to preventing negative experiences from occurring.

Of course, it would be impossible to entirely eliminate bad study abroad experiences, but students should be educated and prepared for the worst in the case that circumstances combine to create uncomfortable or intolerable situations in other countries. Although the margin of bad experiences is small, that margin might be made even smaller if students make it their business to get the details what might possibly go wrong while abroad, in the case that study abroad offices aren’t providing that information.

In the end, while learning about bad semesters spent abroad is a little frightening, it could lead to the improvement of study abroad experiences overall and help to eliminate organizational problems and misunderstandings between students and those running the programs.