In the wake of rising global concern over COVID-19, a newly-discovered strain of coronavirus, Oberlin students are finding their study away programs altered or abruptly terminated in countries facing travel advisories. Although the College has issued statements indicating its ongoing support for affected students, the situation has raised questions about how program cancelations will impact the remainder of these students’ academic careers. “As of March 4, six of those programs have made the decision to suspend the in-country portion of their semesters, impacting 12 Oberlin students,” Director of International Programs and Study Away Mike Rainaldi wrote in an email to the Review. “Those decisions to cancel were not ...

Last week, I began looking into Oberlin-affiliated study abroad programs that fit my interests. As a Politics/East Asian Studies double major, I was looking for an interdisciplinary program in China, so that I could simultaneously take classes in Politics and attain fluency in Chinese. Given that Politics and East Asian Studies is a popular double major at Oberlin, I had hoped such a program would exist. However, the Oberlin-affiliated programs in China are solely culture- and language-based. I was surprised that Oberlin, a college with one of the nation’s oldest and most renowned East Asian Studies programs, offers such narrowly focused, language-only in-China study abroad opportunities. While attaining proficiency...

The Winter Term trip to Mexico has a 30-year tradition in the Hispanic Studies department. This year, however, the trip is still being vetted by the Office of Study Away, thanks to a new policy restricting student travel to potentially dangerous countries. The Travel Warning policy states that “students are not permitted to receive academic credit or use College or Conservatory funding for activities in countries that are subject to Travel Warning issues by the U.S. State Department.” According to the State Department’s website, these warnings range from risk of arrest and long-term detention in North Korea and the threat of sporadic terrorist attacks in the Philippines, to drug-related violence in Mexico and...