As it continues pushing for more students to acquire experience abroad, the College is also redoubling its efforts to ensure that students can find Harvard rigor—even when their study or research is taking place in other parts of the world.

As more and more students do choose to go abroad, the College is expanding its own study abroad offerings, and providing incentives to faculty to design and lead various projects abroad for undergraduates—in hopes of using faculty connections with their colleagues in foreign institutions to their full potential.

And next year, the College will also review its guidelines for evaluating the quality of study abroad programs and granting credit for them.

TRANSPLANTING HARVARD

“I talked to a lot of people who don’t go abroad because they don’t want to miss a semester of Harvard,” says Anna G. Dolganov ’05, a classics concentrator who studied abroad last spring in Rome, through a Duke University-sponsored program. “And they’re not going because they’re afraid....They’ve heard the courses are b.s. and not very challenging.”

But the College is working hard to make sure that students do find their time abroad to be commensurate with the Harvard academic experience.

“We always want to make sure that the quality of the programs that students go to is commensurate with what we would normally give credit for at Harvard,” says John H. Coatsworth, chair of the Committee on Education Abroad (CEA).

While globe-trotting students have in the past relied heavily on other schools’ study abroad programs—Harvard only offered two choices in 2003—Harvard has increased the number of Summer School programs it is offering this summer to 10 programs, including ones in Beijing, the Czech Republic, Oxford, and Barcelona, up from seven last year.

And for next summer, Harvard—in collaboration with Ca’Foscari University—has designed summer programs in Venice on art conservation and lagoon biology, according to Director of the Office of International Programs (OIP) Jane Edwards.

In addition, the OIP is currently developing summer and term-time study abroad programs that are “still very much on the drawing board,” according to Edwards.

They include projects in South Asia in collaboration with the Harvard South Asia Initiative, and research-based programs in Africa, in collaboration with the School of Public Health and the Harvard Initiative for Public Health.

Rather than granting “permission to go abroad in a kind of passive way” and “wait[ing] for students to come to us and get approval,” says Coatsworth, who is also director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, “we’re very aggressive about both identifying and organizing opportunities abroad.”

“If Harvard set up more challenging, more interesting programs where the student can go with a clean conscience, and are guaranteed to learn something, I think that will provide an incentive for people to go who would otherwise not have gone,” Dolganov says.

“Yes, the push is to get you abroad at any place,” says Edwards, but “it’s about getting you abroad into the program that will best suit your needs.”

TAPPING THE FACULTY