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Science Abroad

By Robert Perkins

Study abroad is increasingly popular – and doable – with science, technology, engineering and math majors.

WHILE HER PRE-MED PEERS were reading textbooks about global health problems, USC biological sciences major Katherine Lubina was encountering them firsthand. She spent last spring in Nicaragua studying the prevalence of pesticide poisoning.

“It’s the best decision I’ve made to date,” Lubina says of her choice to leave the security of home to get hands-on experience in public health.

Lubina is among a growing number of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors at USC who are embracing the challenges – and opportunities – of study abroad. Traditionally STEM majors have viewed study abroad as an unnecessary digression that only delayed graduation. But increasingly, people like Lubina and Kotaro Uyeda, a sports science and kinesiology major, are rejecting that conventional wisdom. “You feel like you’re more limited than you actually are,” says Uyeda, who studied anatomy in Australia last spring.

With the right planning, study abroad can fit into even the most rigorous academic schedule, says Peter Hilton of the Office of Overseas Studies, based at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Hilton’s office has stepped up its recruiting of STEM majors over the past decade. The effort appears to be working. In the 2002-03 school year, STEM majors had accounted for just 4 percent of students studying abroad. Last year, they made up more than 17 percent. Most take a semester at a foreign university; others take shorter trips led by faculty or by the student-run organization Engineers Without Borders.

Study abroad was “such an important part of my coursework,” says Christine Sur (pictured above), an environmental studies major who has traveled to Australia, Belize, Guam and Palau through USC. “It was a completely different experience than I could have gotten [on campus].”

Sur’s trips to Guam and Palau were led by professor Jim Haw, environmental studies director at USC Dornsife. Every year, Haw takes students who have completed a scientific research diving course at the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies to the South Pacific to do hands-on environmental science. The experience left Sur with skills that she now is putting to use studying the density of sea grass at Big Fisherman’s Cove on Catalina Island.

Hilton recommends that STEM students wishing to study abroad start planning no later than early in their sophomore year. But his office does not turn away students later in their undergraduate careers.

Take Uyeda. He didn’t submit an application to study abroad until the spring semester of his senior year. The overseas studies office and his academic adviser helped him find classes that would fulfill his USC requirements. He still needed an extra semester to finish his coursework, but Uyeda says he has no regrets.

“I thought I needed to graduate and get a job quickly,” Uyeda says. Now he’s considering graduate studies in biomedical engineering. “It’s OK to wait,” he adds.

In the meantime, the Australian Consulate has hired him to promote study abroad in Australia to students at USC. “It’s not really a difficult sell,” he says.