Short-Term Student-Faculty Trips and Research

At Barnard we believe that education isn't confined to the classroom. Every year, faculty have the opportunity to take the classroom outside Barnard's gates on small focused trips to an international destination. Whether students are learning about theatre in Helsinki, attending a seminar on global migration in Madrid, or researching soil microbes in Malaysia, these experiences give Barnard students the opportunity to explore the world while studying a subject in depth, guided by a Barnard faculty member.

Faculty interested in hosting a trip should submit a Faculty Student Travel Funding Application to oip@barnard.edu

Examples of past trips:

For Majors:

For the past few years, Professor Joan Snitzer has taken Visual Arts Seniors to Berlin in an effort to inform students about visual arts abroad. Professor Snitzer organized the trip to include access to artists’ studios, curators, museums and dinners with alumnae living there. These special events make the travel abroad experience personal and unique to Barnard.

Faculty bringing students on their research:

In the summer of 2010 and 2012, Professor Krista McGuire to students to Malaysia to to collect soil samples from tropical rain forests. In 2010, they spent one month doing field work at two different sites: the Pasoh Forest Reserve on peninsular Malaysia and Lambir Hills in Borneo. The main focus of the project was to look at how the expansion of oil palm agriculture and logging are affecting the diversity and function of rain forest soils. The soil samples we collected were brought back to Professor McGuire’s lab and the students analyzed them for their independent research and senior thesis projects.

Within a course:

In Fall 2010, Professor Kadambari Baxi took her Architectural Design III studio to Amman, Jordan. The semester long studio explored “diplomacy” as an overall topic. Issues of national identity and representation, international interactions and cultural exchange in relationship with design and architecture were investigated through multiple research topics, such as, design of international currencies, architecture of American embassies, exhibits at the World’s Fairs, etc. The trip to Amman was mid-semester for ten days. While there, students mounted an exhibition based on the studio work at the Studio-X GSAPP (Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) at CUMERC (Columbia University Middle East Research Center), participated in discussions with regional experts and urban development agencies, visited the US embassy and attended a Public Diplomacy Office briefing, and researched the city and surrounding archaeological sites. After the trip, students worked on design proposals titled "“Engines of Diplomacy"” for individually selected sites in Amman.