Bridgewater College Switches from Interterm to May Term

Bridgewater College Switches from Interterm to May Term

No Worries, May Term Will Still Offer Travel Opportunities

By Kate Flora, Staff Writer

Bridgewater, Va. - In the fall semester of 2016 , Bridgewater College made the decision to change the January Interterm to a May Term. The three week period will now be offered after the spring semester starting in the 2017-18 school year.Bridgewater students caused quite a stir against this change.

Despite the switch from a January Interterm to a May Term, the Study Abroad Officeis still vigorously planning travel courses that students can take part in. The change is producing many outcomes.According to the Study Abroad section on Bridgewater’s website, “You’ll gain first-hand knowledge of another culture while traveling with a BC professor and your fellow students.”

Amherst College, in Amherst, MA, has an Interterm in January that is similar to what Bridgewater will have until the 2017-18 school year. According to Amherst’s website, their students can “take informal non-credit courses, work on a senior thesis, attend Amherst College athletic events, or take a course at one of the other college campuses around Amherst.”

Nearby Mary Baldwin University in Staunton, however, has had a May Term for many years. Similarto Bridgewater’s Interterm, MBU takes the opportunity of their May Term to offer more hands-on experiential learning classes, both on and off campus. “With a wide range of subjects from which to choose, these courses often include field trips or other excursions,” according to the University’s website.

A new portion that will be added to the travel courses offered will be the addition of a few days of class on campus prior to leaving for trips. This input will give students more context for the trip and perhaps cause less of a culture shock for those who have never travelled before. “The idea is to ultimately enhance the students’ travel experience by giving them more knowledge on the front end,” said Anne Marsh, director of Study Abroad at Bridgewater.

The switch to May for travel courses offers both pros and cons for students. Some students already have summer jobs and internships lined up to start in May, so these students would have the opposite problem.“The hope is that more students will take part in experiential learning whether it’s travel courses or taking advantage of for-credit internship opportunities and domestic travel,” said Marsh.

Marsh pointed out that the main concern for a lot of faculty is the cost difference in May as opposed to January, as May is a more popular time to travel than January. On the flipside, May also offers certain sites and nicer weather unavailable in January.

A slightly more drastic change in the program is that May term will not be automatically included in tuition each year. Starting with the class of 2021, students will only receive two May terms included in the price of tuition. If a student wishes to take more than two, they will have to pay the allotted tuition for that term in addition to the spring semester tuition.

Freshman will get the opportunity to travel in May where they had not before. For the January interterm, there was not enough time for a new student to sign up for the course and pay the deposit. New students did not havea record for faculty to see in order to assess whether the student was in good enough standing to take a travel course. Now that the May term will be after their first year, faculty will be more likely to grant students that opportunity.

Athletes who have never been able to travel in January before will now more easily be able to take part. Another pro that comes with switching to a May term is the freedom to make the trips longer. With interterm, there was always a pressure to get back on campus for the start of spring semester. According to Marsh, some courses may even be extended to as long as four weeks.

Jeff Pierson, a Communication professor at Bridgewater, has been in charge of COMM 333X in London and Berlin during evenly numbered years for Interterm since 2002. With this course, the main concern, according to Pierson, was the cost difference since traveling in May is a popular option for more people.

“I’m actually pretty optimistic that we’re going to get decent fares,” said Pierson. “It looks like from a cost perspective it’s going to be not much of a bigger increase than I would have expected if [the trip] stayed in January.”

Pierson did some research about the specific travel time. The trip, scheduled for the first official May term in 2018, is scheduled to end a bit before Memorial Day weekend, which is a big weekend for American travel. Since the trip will be over right before that weekend, the group should be able to avoid the bulk of the crowd, according to Pierson.

Samantha Savage, a current junior, attended the previous London and Berlin travel course in January of 2016. “It was definitely a fantastic trip, but the cold did get in the way some of the time. I can’t imagine how nice it would have been to go in May with the longer days and warmer weather,” she said.

The addition of an on-campus portion of class prior to leaving for the travel courses will help Pierson out a lot with his trip planning. In past years, he has held four or five hour meetings on a Sunday before the end of fall semester to give students a lot of the information they will need to travel. “It’ll be nice because it’ll save us time while we’re there,” said Pierson, since the group would have just had a class about the background of the countries and their cultures.

Another aspect that Pierson is excited about is for the students to get more of a historical background of the Berlin Wall, which he feels may have been more easily overlooked in this generation’s history classes since it was a more recent event. “The days will be longer too, which will definitely add to excursions,” said Pierson.

One travel course that will be affected much differently by the switch to May is COMM 331X which takes place in Los Angeles and is led by Michele Strano and Benjamin Erickson on odd years. Since the trip revolves around going to the filming of different types of shows and attending award shows, both of which happen in January, the future of the trip is in question.

“I had the opportunity to go to the People’s Choice Awards during my trip to L.A. in January. We wouldn’t have been able to go to an award show if it was in May,” said Kayla Wright, a senior who took the LA travel course this past January.

According to Strano, however, the travel course will most likely still happen, just not in the May term. “We have been talking about doing it as a spring semester course where the trip happens during spring break, so you could meet once a week in a class for the 15 weeks we are on campus,” said Strano. Thestudents would need 30 additional credit hours to have the full 45 for the course, which they would attain during the spring break trip.

The traveling portion would be shorter for this plan, but students would also be able to learn a lot more about what they saw and apply it to classroom concepts. Students would also have less to do in terms of academics during the actual excursion, since it would only be a week-long trip. Students who have taken this course in previous years have had to write papers and get assignments done throughout the two-three week period of travel, according to Strano.

“It changes the nature of the course some, but it will still give them the same experience,” said Strano. “It would give us time to do stuff there like take video clips and do a kind of documentary about the trip, so it would allow us to actually process the trip a little bit more.”

The decision to change Interterm to a May term may have caught a lot of students by surprise, but the opportunities will still be plentiful for students.