Summer study programs transform local students

Professor Suzanne LaLonde took the microphone in the lobby of the Brownsville/South Padre Island International Airport on Thursday morning and, with a convincing impersonation of a flight attendant, proceeded to make an unusual announcement.

In French, the professor informed her students that it was time to file through security and wait to board their first plane of the day. Soon, they'd be in Paris.

"Bon voyage," LaLonde told them, to the delight of the plane's flight attendant. Have a good trip.

The 18 students who boarded the airplane with LaLonde attend the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, a school primarily composed of a commuter population in one of the poorest cities in the country.

Students who attend UTB-TSC make their dollars count and most must be assured of a job immediately after graduation. Therefore, most of the school's programs are vocation oriented, like nursing, engineering and computer science. Unlike their counterparts at liberal arts schools, they rarely have the chance to stray from these pragmatic programs.

So as LaLonde, who is also the director of the study abroad program, leads these students to Paris for a summer study away program, she has a special chance to open up a rich world of history, art, philosophy, and culture and imbibe these thirsty young minds. The 3½ weeks the students spend abroad offer a new approach to learning. They momentarily step away from their career-focused degrees to contemplate the world and who they would like to become in it.

Across the Ocean

The French announcement at Brownsville's airport was just a small example of the immersion UTB-TSC's study abroad leaders provide when they bring students abroad. There will be no bus tours - students are not traveling across the world to see foreign countries from behind glass. Rather, study abroad students are encouraged to talk to foreigners, to delve into the philosophical movements that shaped the history of other nations, and to think deeply about other ways of life. They will learn to use the metro, look at some of the world's greatest art at the Louvre, attend the Paris Jazz Festival and visit some of the country's haunting gothic cathedrals.

Many students waiting to board the plane for Paris on Thursday admitted to stomach-clenching nerves.

"I'm nervous and excited," said Anahi Moreno, a 21-year-old student at UTB-TSC. Like most of those going on the trip, Moreno has never been out of the country, except to visit nearby Mexico. It took one of her friends, Stephanie Rodriguez, to convince her.

Both girls saved money all year to pay for the trip, and also received scholarships from the Walter Pierce Study Abroad Endowment.

Pierce lived from 1946 to 1997, when he passed away suddenly. An avid traveler and organizer of student trips, his family established a scholarship fund in his name to help students afford the cost of trips abroad. Students venturing on the Paris trip raised money through part-time jobs and fundraisers like garage sales.

The trip will allow some students to fulfill lifelong dreams.

"Since age 7 it has been my dream to go to Paris," said April Potter, a 19-year-old art student at UTB-TSC. "The old masters created such amazing things. The architecture of Paris is an almost spiritual experience for artists."

Potter said that LaLonde has been no pushover as the students have taken French classes and prepared for their trip.

"She demands excellence of us because she knows we can achieve it," Potter said.

This is the second group of UTB-TSC students to go on a study abroad trip this summer. Associate professor Angelika Soldan and retired professor Norman Binder escorted students to Germany earlier this year. Students will also travel to Spain in July with Dr. Juan Davila. The study abroad office has also hosted summer programs in Ireland, Mexico and Peru. Aside from the study abroad summer programs, which students earn credit for, students can also choose to spend a semester living and studying in Paris and Barcelona. Students who spend a semester in Paris attend the Sorbonne, a university established in 1253. In Spain students attend the University of Barcelona.

Personal Approach

Both Soldan and LaLonde have a personal connection to the countries they are visiting with their students. LaLonde went to school in France and has a deep connection with the country's teaching philosophy.

Soldan grew up in East Berlin, and says teaching students about the history of this now fully democratic country has forced her to confront her own past.

"For me it's a journey of discovery," Soldan said. "It's a journey into my own past, my parents and my grandparents past, too. I have to explain many things to my students - about Nazism and fascism. I have to explain when I woke up from it all and decided I had to go out and protest."

Soldan was a young professor in Berlin when the wall came down. Leading up to this historic moment, her own students at that time questioned her, asking why they weren't allowed to travel to the western half of the city if their government was so convinced they wouldn't like what they saw.

"They would tell us, ‘If you go over there you will be so overwhelmed by capitalistic impulses you will never be able to break away from it.' " It still upsets Soldan to think about all she was deprived of as a young woman in Berlin. Her few trips in those days were to the former Soviet Union and former Czechoslovakia.

When she finally left East Berlin she was eager to come to the United States.

"I wanted to see palm trees and mountains," Soldan said. "I had grown up in this little country and I wanted to see it from the outside."

Outside Looking In

Similarly, Soldan wants to help her students see their own country from outside its borders.

On the study abroad trip Soldan took her students to a German university where students were taking a class called Latino Studies.

"The Germans had never met Hispanics, and especially so many at one time," Soldan said. "But they had read about Brownsville and imagined life in the Valley. Of course, some of what they said was full of stereotypes. So the UTB students were able to see, here we're the studied objects. They were able to tell the German students, ‘Hey, this is how we really are.' " The UTB-TSC students returned again to the class to spend more time with the German students.

While some of the students at the airport on Thursday were tongue-tied as they double-checked their luggage and said goodbye to their families, LaLonde and Soldan have witnessed how students emerge at the end of these foreign experiences: confident and inspired.

"These experiences can be a real eye-opener for the students," Soldan said. "They make them appreciate education and want to continue learning more about other cultures. They look at things in a more critical light. It's also a boost for their self-confidence. They gain new skills by living in a foreign country, skills they never knew they could master."

At the end of the Berlin trip Soldan asked her students to write essays about what they gained from the trip.

"It was interesting to see," Soldan said. "It had made quite an impact on them."

Next Generation

LaLonde and Soldan were both gratified to see how positively the experience has impacted the female participants on these trips. Girls whose families are afraid to let them travel, even for a couple of weeks, come back self-assured.

"Some of the girls were surprised by how easy it was for them to handle the transition," Soldan said. "If you've never been outside of the Valley or away from your family, it's probably doubly as hard to leave."

While the parents gathered at the airport Thursday shed a few tears as they said goodbye, they were also happy for their young adventurers.

Eva Salazar, whose daughter goes by the same name, said preparing for her daughter's trip had inspired her and her husband to travel.

Next summer the whole family plans to travel to Italy together.

"We thought, why not? We can do it, too," said Salazar, the daughter of a housewife and a manual laborer. Now she and her husband work for the school district, and she wants to give her daughter every opportunity to reach for the stars.

"Every generation should want more," Salazar said. "This is something my daughter will pass on to the next generation."