Butler students have the opportunity to visit Greece on one of many short-term study abroad programs. Photo by Aidan Gregg.
SAMANTHA RITTENBERG | STAFF REPORTER | srittenberg@butler.edu
Students can start packing their bags soon because traveling abroad in the spring is right around the corner. Butler takes a unique approach to the universe of study abroad, offering both short-term trips as well as semester-long programs.
Each trip is centered around a specific course, and students can receive three credit hours per trip. Students are encouraged to go on trips no matter their major or year; there’s a little something for everyone. All of them are led by Butler faculty, who typically also teach the course on campus.
Spring Break Trips
Butler has study-abroad opportunities worldwide. For spring break alone, Butler offers nine trips across Africa, Asia, Europe, Central America and Latin America.
Tourism and Hospitality Communication and Culture
This trip features a 10-day jam-packed Mediterranean cruise, where students will begin the adventure in Barcelona, Spain, and then stop in France, Italy and Africa. Prior to the trip, students will be divided up into groups, and each will be assigned a city to complete in-depth research on. They will act as tour guides for their specific city, coordinating tours and talking to professionals to plan the group’s day in that port.
The trip is open to all Butler students and fills a strategic communication elective course.
Internship director and lecturer Bob Schultz will lead the trip and is excited to have students experience tourism firsthand.
“A travel and tourism experience is the coming together of some of the best pieces of why I am a professor: seeing the learning happen, experiencing that alongside students [and] opening the eyes, hearts and minds of our students to [a] broader awareness of our global economy as well as the cultures that we’ll be embracing,” Schultz said. “I love teaching, and I love seeing students come alive to lessons that are going to help shape their lives and their professions for the future.”
Spring 2025 is the first time this trip is being offered, while Shultz hopes that it will continue in the future.
This spring break trip takes students to the beautiful city of Amsterdam, where they will venture into the charming art scene and canal-surrounded town. The trip will focus on how chemistry has been used to produce weaponry. They will visit several museums, including the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the Dutch Resistance Museum — otherwise known as the Verzetsmuseum. Students will also have a chance to visit the Anne Frank House — which has since been turned into a museum — where they will see the Secret Annex where Anne Frank and her family hid. The students will take a day trip to the west coast of the Netherlands and home to the Dutch royal family — the idyllic and Gothic-style city of Hague.
This trip is directed toward chemistry majors and minors and is an upper-level course.
The limited number of seats means that the trips often end up being a small group of students that have the unique chance to get to know each other on a deeper level.
Studying abroad without knowing anyone during previous Butler-affiliated two-week programs did not stop senior biology major Alyssa Potts from signing up for a third trip.
“You get to know this group of people so well in two weeks because you’re basically just relying on each other in a place that likely all of you have never been before,” Potts said. “You make a lot of memories and friendships that [you would not make otherwise]. It’s an amazing experience because even though I didn’t start with friends in the program, I made a lot of friends doing these programs.”
Whether sharing a picturesque canal ride with a new friend or practicing Dutch at a cafe at a cramped table of four, there are countless opportunities to make lifelong friends.
Summer break trips
Students also love having the option to fill class requirements through study abroad programs in the summer. They are usually for slighter longer periods of time; therefore, the students have more leeway to explore.
This two-week trip features a literary tour of Europe, where students will travel to Barcelona, Spain, Nice, France and Monaco. The trip focuses on historically famous authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and how these places influenced their work.
The trip is open to all Butler students and fills an honors credit or an English independent study.
Madeline Dauphin, a junior political science and psychology double major, loved her classroom experiences at Butler but is excited to go one step further.
“There’s something about being immersed into what you’re learning about and seeing it firsthand that makes it so much more real,” Dauphin said. “Not only are you learning and hearing these stories, but you’re actually seeing where it happened and engaging with it in real life, rather than reading about it and watching a video in class.”
This three-week study abroad program allows students to combine in-class learning with travel. Students are in the classroom Tuesday through Friday morning, with a three-day weekend for traveling independently to a place of their choosing, such as the English countryside or neighboring countries. Following each morning of learning, students will have the chance to explore the great sites of London, including Big Ben, Notting Hill, the Tower of London and more. In a city like London, there is no such thing as too much sightseeing.
All students on the trip participate in a class called Leadership London. The class focuses on nine different case studies surrounding the cultural, historical and ethical issues relevant to leadership in the city and culminates with a final paper.
Not all students can fit a semester-long study abroad program into their rigorous schedule, so these short-term trips are a perfect way to get a taste of another country and its culture.
The opportunity to travel abroad does not take place often after college, and there aren’t many chances in the work world to take off a couple of weeks — even to experience something as important as immersing oneself in new cultures.
These are just a sample of the many courses offered abroad this spring and summer. Many more options are available on the study abroad website.
