Recent Participants: Please complete and return the Foreign Study Evaluation Form so that we can improve our programs and so that we know you would like to apply foreign study credit to your major.

Potential Participants: The Mount currently has four semester-long foreign study programs on a rotation, along with two summer foreign study programs on a rotation. In addition, this summer, the Mount is piloting two additional foreign study programs. The list of programs is as follows:

Florence, Italy – spring semesters 2008, 2010, etc.

Seville, Spain – summers 2008, 2010, etc.

Tours, France– summer 2008

Salzburg, Austria– summer 2008

Prague, Czech Republic – fall semesters 2008, 2010, etc.

London, England – spring semesters 2009, 2011, etc.

Costa Rica – summers 2009, 2011, etc.

Dublin, Ireland – fall semesters 2009, 2011, etc.

On each of these programs, Mount faculty members accompany the students and teach some of the courses. The four semester-long programs are conducted with the assistance of the American Institute for Foreign Studies (AIFS). AIFS arranges group flight schedules, home-stays with host families or apartment-style housing for students, use of facilities with host universities, student services on site, local professors to teach some of the courses, and outings to local cultural/historical sites. Students enroll for twelve credits of course work in these programs:

• London is a consortium program conducted with AIFS and three other colleges and universities from the United States—the University of Wyoming, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Mountain State College of Denver. Students take three of the eight courses offered by professors from the four schools and a course on British life and culture, taught by local professors.
• Dublin:  Students take two courses offered by the Mount professor as well as an Irish life and culture course and an Irish history course.
• Florence:  Students study Italian 101 at the Mount during the fall semester preceding the trip and then take Italian 102 as one of their four courses in Florence. The Mount professor offers two courses, and AIFS arranges for an Italian life and culture course and the Italian language course.
• Prague:  Students take two courses offered by the Mount professor as well as two Czech life and culture courses. There is brief immersion into Czech during the opening weeks of the semester.

The summer program in Costa Rica is arranged by our professor Diana Rodriguez-Lozano and conducted at an institute in San José. Students enroll for nine credits of course work – two courses of Spanish with professors from the institute and a third course with Professor Rodriguez-Lozano. Twenty students took part in this program in May-June, 2005.

The summer program in Seville, Spain, is led by Dr. Rodriguez-Lozano and conducted at the Center for Cross-Cultural Study. Students normally enroll for a four-credit, four-week course in Spanish language and live with a family in Seville. This is a total immersion experience, and a condition of being accepted into the program is that students sign a contract to speak only Spanish while in the center and on excursions sponsored by the center.

Students are also able to enroll in foreign studies programs that are not sponsored directly by Mount St. Mary’s. In recent years, Mount students have spent semesters in Salzburg, Austria, through a program offered by AIFS, at Butler University in Ireland, and at the University of Economics in Prague. In these cases, students meet in advance of their semester(s) abroad with the relevant department chairs on our campus to ensure that the courses they plan to take will be accepted in transfer by Mount St. Mary’s.

One significant difference between the programs we sponsor and the programs taken through other colleges or institutes is that scholarships from Mount St. Mary’s University are applied to our programs but not to other programs.

A common question:  Since I’ll be taking only 12 credits, instead of 15, will I still be able to graduate on time?

It does take some planning ahead, but yes, students participate in foreign studies and still graduate on time. Some students have even gone on two semester-long programs and still graduated on time. Some brought in AP credits; others took more than 15 credits for several semesters; others took a course during summer school to catch up on the credits they “missed” while abroad. It has been more difficult for majors in business, the sciences and education to do a foreign studies program, but some students in these majors have accomplished this.