Taso Lagos | Director of the Athens International Program

In any given month of the year, many UW students are studying, doing research or engaged in cool learning somewhere on the globe.

Study abroad used to be exotic; only the rich, the elite or the globally minded used to travel overseas for college credit. Now, it’s a regular feature of college life. All those pictures of your friends in exotic locations on Facebook didn’t just happen by accident.

In the 2003-2004 school year, more than 191,000 American students studied abroad; 10 years before that, it was 76,000. That’s a jump of 250 percent.

About 60 percent of students today will study abroad at some point in their college careers.

There are many reasons why students go abroad. We live in a more global world, true. But for many, it’s also a chance to get beyond the four walls of the ordinary classroom.

Before the Internet, when knowledge was contained in a library or in a professor’s office, it made sense for students to hear professors lecturing. Now, with the Web, when students can, in some cases, become “instant experts,” the idea of lecturing, while still important, is losing out to technology.

Study abroad offers a way to reinvent education, to learn a language not out of a book but in its native country, to do original ethnographic research — as we do in the Athens Program — whereby students meet and interview ordinary Greeks, to study development in countries that desperately need it.

Sometimes, things can go wrong. Two years ago, there were two emergencies involving UW programs abroad ­— one in Ghana and the other in Greece. I was in Greece with 13 students and my assistant when we were briefly trapped on a Greek island with fires raging out of control. So, I am no stranger to what can go wrong abroad.

But I also know what can go right.

I have seen students transform from quiet and meek wallpaper to confident and purposeful human beings. I have seen students who once complained about what was wrong with the country we were in become more caring and thoughtful and respectful of our host nation. I have seen students who were terrified of public speaking present at one of our own mini-conferences, and do so confidently and eloquently. I have seen students who had little experience with video cameras suddenly become video journalists and ask pointed questions at Greek government officials.

When done right, study abroad opens up new vistas in education. It challenges students to step up and take initiative. At first they resist, but in time, when they realize the value of what they are learning, they make huge leaps and grow as human beings in the process.

That might mean producing a publishable paper in an academic journal. Imagine: undergraduates getting published in referred journals.

From a teaching perspective, study abroad can be difficult because it requires more time and commitment. I am constantly learning from my students, who don’t hesitate to tell me when I’ve screwed up. But that is part of the greatness of study abroad; you spend time with and get to know your professors.

And when it’s time to write those letters of recommendation for graduate or law school, I know what to say about my students because I know them.

No student should ever leave college without studying abroad.

Taso Lagos is the director of the Athens International Program, which began in 2005 and is part of the Hellenic Studies Program at the Jackson School of International Studies. Lagos also teaches in the Honors Program. His next study abroad will be in spring 2010.

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