Some study-service sites grow out of historical connections between Saint Olaf, its sponsoring church, and religious institutions abroade.g., the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Hong Kong, the Martin Luther Seminary in Papua New Guinea, and Satya Wacana Christian University in Indonesia. Others are more recent, particularly a Biology-centered program in South India, based in Madras, with independent study options in the areas of health care, agriculture, fishing, and mountain ecology. They arrange housing, implement the curriculum, arrange for language classes, hire lecturers and plan the field trips in cooperation with local assistants. Once the students arrive, the faculty provide the administrative link to the campus, functioning as counselors, mentors and teachers for the approximately 20 students in each group. The 13-week term is divided equally between study and service.
Students write weekly journals which faculty mentors read and return with comments.
Monitoring journal-writing is the primary means of following a student's personal and academic growth. Student eat two meals a day with the family and participate in normal family activities. Since the service assignments are usually in a rural setting, students live with a second host family or at the institution where they work. Significant learning occurs during this time as the students contend with new living conditions, the work world and more independence than they had during their study time. A strength and a weakness of the program is that it is a general-education requirement, i.e., designed for all students, not just language majors.