Students enrolling in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences should be aware—Marilyn McPheron wants them out of the country.

“It’s for their own good,” says the college’s study-abroad coordinator. “Our goal is that every major in the college will offer an imbedded international opportunity,” she says. “We encourage all students to have an international experience. It can be seven days long or it can last a semester. Afterward, students tell us that going abroad is a highlight of their undergraduate career. They say it made them more independent—that afterward they realize that they can do anything they want to with their life. I tell the kids, ‘You have just got to do it.’”

In recent years, students in the college have gone on Penn State–sanctioned trips to Australia, Sri Lanka, Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, New Zealand, Germany, Puerto Rico, Peru, Mexico, Mongolia, Ireland, Great Britain, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Austria, Honduras, Greece, Jamaica, Vietnam, Ghana, South Africa, Scotland, Belize, Kenya, Kazakhstan, and Haiti.

“If a freshman tells me that he or she wants to study abroad, I ask him or her questions,” McPheron says. “Do you speak a language? Do you want to go where your ancestors are from? How important are costs? Do you want to take courses in your major? Together we can work out a customized opportunity, and we can work with the student’s academic adviser to make a trip an internship. It doesn’t have to be a ‘canned’ program, but we do have organized trips taken by a number of students together.”

For most student international experiences, McPheron and the college take care of housing and study arrangements. There are funds available, such as endowments and grants for undergraduate research, to defray costs incurred by students going abroad. When a trip is embedded in a course, it is usually scheduled over spring break, but some trips take place at the end of the semester.

Students may opt to go for a semester and take general education courses, such as culture and anthropology, at a foreign university, according to McPheron, or they can set up internships and independent research projects.

“A lot of times kids say, ‘Why is this important? I am not intending to work overseas,’” she says. “But with the Internet, every business is international. We are not isolated, and every single student has come back from a study-abroad experience and said, ‘This has changed my life.’ And more than half come back and say, ‘This has made me understand what I want to do with my career.’ For them, it was a life-defining experience.”

— Jeff Mulhollem