By Emi Kojima
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
SANTIAGO, Chile “”mdash; The night before their midterm, Eric
Brewer and Henry Bermudez were traveling, sleeping at the base of
Argentina’s Cerro Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South
America. The two students of the UC Education Abroad Program found
themselves hours away from their university in Santiago, Chile
““ and with a huge academic conflict.
“We only had a half a bag of cheese puffs and a half a
liter of water that froze during the night,” said Bermudez, a
second-year Latin American Studies and Latin American literature
student at UC Berkeley. “We had no tent and not enough money
to get back home.”
Finally, after trying to hitchhike back to Santiago without
success, they managed to catch a bus from the Argentinean border
patrol when Bermudez pestered the driver into letting them pay
their remaining 10,000 Chilean pesos (the equivalent of $20) and
pay the rest of the fare when they could go to an ATM at the bus
terminal.
“We just got lucky and got back two hours before the
test,” said Brewer, a third-year Latin American Studies
student at UC Santa Cruz said, referring not only to their arrival
but also to the A’s both received on the test.
Bermudez and Brewer aren’t the only EAP students who went
abroad with travel in mind. In fact, travel is the reason many
students look into the EAP, a program in which UC students study at
universities in more than 30 countries and take classes that
transfer for their degrees.
But Bermudez and Brewer’s story is a good example of how
patiperros ““ the Chilean term for wanderlust globetrotters
““ run into problems when their obligations as students call
them back to home base.
Gwen Kirkpatrick, director of the Chile Study Center and
professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley, said balancing
traveling and studying really is a question of time management by
students, like any extracurricular activity.
She added that traveling for EAP students isn’t an
either-or situation. “It’s not EAP or travel. With EAP
you have traveled,” Kirkpatrick said.
For Ann Marie Harrison, a third-year psychology and Spanish
student at UC Davis, traveling as an EAP student is “so
do-able.”
“Half the time in the States you’re zoning out in
class anyway, so why not do something exciting?” she
asked.
Harrison said that she has skipped some classes, but
hasn’t had any direct academic conflicts because she
scheduled her trips around papers and tests.
Before departing, all students signed a student agreement to
conform to student codes of conduct, including good attendance.
According to the student guide, class attendance is mandatory
because “high absenteeism may damage the relationship between
UC and the host university and may lead to a student’s
dismissal from the program.”
Although no students have been kicked out of the Chile program
for absences during the past two years, professors at the host
universities have complained, Kirkpatrick said.
“It’s hard to say how excellent the students are,
and then have them not go to class,” she said. “Part of
the contract that the university has agreed to is that professors
grade foreign students the same way they grade Chilean
students.”
Foreigners definitely travel more than Chilean students,
according to Rosa Bahamondes, a teaching assistant who instructs
English and Spanish at the University of Chile to both Chilean and
foreign students. But she noted that it is easy to generalize about
extranjeros because they stand out more than national students.
“I have mixed feelings,” she said.
“They’re here, and would you rather study for a test or
travel?”
And travel often wins out in the students’ cost-benefit
analyses. For example, about one-half of the students attended the
required orientation class for all EAP students in Chile before the
long weekend of Semana Santa (March 21-23), which many foreigners
spent traveling.
Others, such as Honrario Arrendondo Calderon, a professor of
Educacion Musica at the University of Chile, actually encourage
traveling.
“Students need to learn directly and get to know the land,
not only read about it,” she said. “Foreign student
need to travel now, while they’re in Chile and have the
opportunity.”
She said that she learns from the travels of her students when
they come back to class and share their travel stories.
Given the choice to add four countries to his travel repertoire
or go to school, Gerardo Ruiz skipped class.
The fifth-year community and regional development student from
UC Davis, has missed about three weeks of class in total to go to
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and southern Chile. He said
that because he isn’t allowed to work with his student visa,
he uses the time to travel ““ and it actually inspires him to
study more.
“Traveling makes me pursue my studies,” Ruiz said.
“It makes me see how the world is connected through economics
and politics.”
Ruiz tries to apply what he’s learned in the classroom
when he travels. In Paraguay, Ruiz found that the taxi drivers
spoke Spanish, Guarani, Portuguese and a little English.
“Working class people spoke four different languages. It
makes you think about what a developed nation is when in California
there are movements to only teach English in schools,” he
said.
And Ruiz added that he uses travel time to study.
“I pull out my school stuff and read for the weeks of
classes I’m missing,” Ruiz said. “Since bus rides
can be about 20 hours long, you have time to do that.”
Still, there’s no denying that excessive travel can hurt
academic performance.
“Although some students are really responsible, others try
to pull it off at the end and they cram before exams,”
Bahamondes said. “You definitely see a difference.”
Kirkpatrick said that she is thinking about changing the program
to allow more travel time for students and encourages students to
travel before and after the program or arrange their schedules so
that they can have the long weekends for traveling. She mentioned
another option is to take a quarter or semester off.
“A lot of students come from fairly low-income families,
and foreign travel tourism is not always possible,” she said.
“For the same price ““ or less ““ of studying at
home, you can combine them with EAP. The wonderful thing about EAP
is it’s not a kind of luxury program.”
Kojima is currently studying in Chile with the Education Abroad
Program. Check out http://www.isop.ucla.edu/eap for
more information about EAP.