By Andrew Housman
For the students who joined Professor Lori Weintrob’s Expanding Your Horizons trip to Germany and Poland, standing in the ruins of Auschwitz had made history come alive.
“They could feel how the Holocaust had transformed the space of the city of Warsaw,” Weintrob said.
Meanwhile, Renata Pastuszak ’20 was galvanized by scientific research in Peru, as she tested the air quality in the kitchens of adobe brick houses.
Traditionally, these types of experiences are only available to students who have the resources to take an entire semester abroad. The Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) program seeks to change that, allowing students to study abroad in a more compact timeframe, typically during spring break. The program, which started in the early 2000s until a brief hiatus during the pandemic, will return in 2024 with two new trips planned for the spring.
“The content can be so transformative,” said Rita Reynolds, faculty advisor for EYH. “It’s living history.”
Pastuszak, who documented her 2018 EYH classes in Peru and Cuba, said the experiences were unique to her time at Wagner.
“You can’t create these memories anywhere else because you’re traveling with a group of people who are like-minded,” Pastuszak said.
In spring 2019, Sarah Scott, professor of art history, co-led a trip to Greece with theater professor Felicia Ruff that saw their students hopping from Crete to Delphi.
“The students learn a lot about the culture and the content that the course is based on, but I would say equally if not even more life-changing for them is the ability to travel in a foreign country,” Scott said.
This coming spring, Scott is co-leading an Interdiscplinary Learning Community (ILC) class to Spain with Patricia Moynagh, associate professor of government & politics, in which students will cover the history of both the Andalusian period and the Spanish Civil War through film.
In addition, visual arts professor Laura Morowitz and government & politics professor Steve Snow will visit Israel to learn about how the Holocaust influenced the identity and culture of the region.
Modern languages professor Margarita Sánchez said students on her EYH trip to Cartagena, Colombia, experienced the real-world locations of Gabriel García Márquez’s literature.
“Everything is a little bit magic,” she said, referencing Márquez’s works. “There are a lot of spontaneous things that happen when we explore the city. We find people and see things that are almost surreal.”
The program allows students to complete academic requirements by splitting the usual forty-hour course time in half: twenty hours in the classroom, twenty hours of instruction while traveling. (Students must pay for the cost of the travel, which varies depending on the course.)
“I have not had one student who came back and said that they shouldn’t have done this, even if they had challenges during the trip,” Sanchez added. “Not one.”
Reynolds, the EYH faculty advisor, said the program not only exposed students to other cultures, but also to each other.
“Students went as individuals, but they came back as a group. They really functioned as a family,” she said. “They still keep in contact with each other.”
Pastuszak put it simply: “There’s nothing better than traveling in college.”
