Back to top A concerted effort is made to help students with various majors and diverse ethnic backgrounds to study abroad, but officials say the prevailing characteristics of international study participants are the ones common to all Smith students-a spirit of independence, curiosity, a sense of humor and an openness to adventure. Discovering that you can handle new and challenging situations is part of the experience, says Mary Ellen Birkett, professor of French language and literature. It's also about the ability to learn how other people live, think, and do things in their daily lives, which in turn causes students studying abroad to look at themselves and to look in a new way at their own country. Birkett always tells her flock of travelers to expect an adventure. You really are faced with intense self-discovery while studying abroad.
Most students do flower in that year, and come back very different.
For Deborah Czarski '97 of Jones, Oklahoma, an internship in a German hospital during her JYA year in Hamburg confirmed her desire to go into medicine. She was the first nonmedical American student granted permission to shadow German doctors as they made their daily rounds. Czarski, who is a German cultural studies major with a minor in physics and an emphasis on pre-medicine, now hopes to enter medical school in 1998. Student interns at Smith have worked for the United Nations, the International Labor Organization, the International Academy for the Environment and Christie's International, for example. One letter went to a bureau chief at the Paris office of Newsweek.