Every year, Coe students take classes in the fall, classes in the spring, and then have an optional May Term they can take advantage of. Coe professors have taken students across the world on these May Terms. For me, I think May Terms are basically perfect. It's a great way to get that study abroad experience (or that stamp in your passport) without leaving campus for a whole semester or year. The class usually has a small on-campus portion and then we take off to some part of the world.
At a tarn (aka elevated lake)
One of my favorite days abroad
I've been lucky enough to go on two different May Term experiences. In May 2012, I traveled with nine other students and two Coe professors to the northern part of England known as the Lake District. We spent three weeks there, waking up each morning to hike the beautiful countryside and then returning back near dinner to our self-catering cottages for food and discussion on William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who were prominent writers in this area. It was an incredible opportunity and I miss the landscape on a regular basis. I had the opportunity to write for hours every day along with discussing and learning more about two very important writers of the 17th and 18th century in English literature.
To learn more about my trip, click here to see all the posts I wrote while abroad. They are all tagged with "Lake District."
In a building at Birkenau
A memorial in Krakow
Brian (classmate) & I
My second May Term took place in May 2013, where I traveled to Germany and Poland for a World War II and Holocaust memorial trip. This time I traveled with seven other students and one professor. We visited Berlin, Krakow, and Warsaw in about two weeks and saw at least three to four memorials each day. We discovered the ways Germany views the Holocaust and how those differ from the way Poland views and memorializes the Holocaust. With these new experiences, we were able to critically think about how Americans view the Holocaust and where we now fit in with this portion of history. The group visited countless museums and memorials and had the opportunity to visit three very different concentration camps. This trip was just as good as the Lake District trip, but in very different ways. I learned things about the Holocaust that I could have never learned in a classroom and I'm still learning.
Once again, I blogged during this trip and you can click here to see all the posts. These posts are labeled under "Germany and Poland."
My third and final May Term occurred right after I graduated, in May 2014. It was a West Coast Baseball Road Trip. Myself, along with seven other classmates and one professor loaded up a 15 passenger van and went went in search of Major League Baseball.
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It was a fantastic trip, allowing us to see 12 baseball stadiums and far more than 12 baseball games. But don't worry, it wasn't just fun in the sun with hotdogs and peanuts. No, we had assignments, such as reading books about the history of baseball along with writing three essays about our adventures. It was a lot of fun and our class even had a class blog about our trip.
