Currently, the majority of Dartmouth's 37 programs are based in Western Europe.
The engineering department will begin its program in the upcoming academic year with the arrival of three Thai students at Dartmouth in August. The students will do research and take classes at the Thayer School of Engineering. Two or three Dartmouth students will then spend the 2009 Winter and Spring terms at Chulalongkorn University. They will take classes until April and then work in an internship there.
"There will be an opportunity for students from both institutions to take engineering or science courses at the host institution that aren't available at their home institution," Francis Kennedy, a professor of engineering currently in Thailand, said in an e-mail message.
Although courses taken during the winter will count for credit at the College, participating students must use the spring as a leave-term.
WGS and AMES students will study and live at the University of Hyderabad, which allows Western universities to create their own foreign programs. This was one of the determining factors in picking the location, Ivy Schweitzer, chair of the WGS department, said. It was essential for the departments to offer an FSP in accordance with the global perspectives incorporated in their courses, she added.
Hyderabad is an ideal location because it is a multicultural city, but remains Anglophone friendly, Schweitzer said. She added that the plans for the WGS program are still being approved.
Not all academic departments offer opportunities to study abroad. The mathematics department, for example, does not run a program through the College, but encourages students to study abroad with other well-known, reputable institutions, Daniel Rockmore, the department chair said.
"Our students piggyback off of those," Rockmore said.
In order to develop a program through Dartmouth, the department would have to divert significant teaching resources away from Hanover, Rockmore said. He said that he did not think this change would yield enough benefit to be worth it, especially because other programs are "tried and true options." Programs that are not affiliated with Dartmouth can be beneficial to students because they get to interact with new faculty and peers, Rockmore added.
Dartmouth foreign study is relatively unique among college study-abroad programs, because they are led by Dartmouth faculty members, John Tansey, executive director of Dartmouth's Office of Off-Campus Programs, said. Other schools do offer faculty-led trips, but generally these do not comprise the majority of those schools' programs.
Andrew McCann, an English professor who traveled with 15 Dartmouth students to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland last term, supports having Dartmouth faculty members travel with students on off-campus programs. The Dartmouth students were among hundreds of foreign students at Trinity and having a Dartmouth professor there helped prevent the students from being overlooked by the university, he said.
"Having a Dartmouth faculty member means that the university is much more accessible," McCann said. He added that off campus programs are one of the strongest aspects of Dartmouth, and an important part of the college experience.
The College first offered off-campus programs for credit in 1958. Foreign Study Programs began in the early 1960's, and Language Study Abroad programs followed a few years later. The College created the D-Plan when Dartmouth became co-educational in 1972. The introduction of the D-Plan led to further expansion of the off-campus programs.
Many students who have studied abroad multiple times did not originally plan to do so. Sarah Lawson, '09, has gone to Rome on an LSA, spent an off term as the TA for the Rome LSA+ and is currently on the Anthropology and Linguistics FSP in New Zealand.
"If I had tried to plan all this, I don't think I could have done it," Lawson said. "I applied for what I wanted to do and it all worked out."
