Study-Service TermGoshen College’s Study-Service Term is one of the quintessential aspects of the institution. Follow our coverage as the program changes and grows.
Goshen College’s Study-Service Term is one of the quintessential aspects of the institution. Follow our coverage as the program changes and grows.
September 12, 2012
Summer around the world
Four students–one SSTer, one Maple Scholar, one camp counselor and one Ministry Inquiry program participant–share their warm weather experiences. “This summer I had the pleasure of leaving the flat farmland of Indiana behind in favor of the much more dramatic Colorado Rockies as I worked at Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp. I was a counselor and was able to work with kids from third grade through high school. We went on three hikes every week, to valleys, waterfalls and mountains, including 14,110-foot-high Pikes Peak. We occasionally had to coax campers into making it all the way to the end, but I...
September 12, 2012
A new country, a new language for fall SSTs
This fall, two Study-Service Term units are pioneering changes for the SST program. Both the Peru and Morocco units, which departed September 5, hold significant new components. Though Goshen College has traveled to Morocco twice with the “Spain and Morocco” May Term, there has never been a full SST there, according to Tom Meyers, director of international education. Morocco SST students had originally signed up to travel to Egypt, where a unit ran in 2010. Egypt 2010 was “very successful,” Meyers said. However, two months after Goshen College students returned from Egypt, a revolution made the country unstable. Meyers...
March 28, 2012
Domestic SST program undergoes major revisions
Starting in fall 2012, Goshen College students who choose not to take an international Study Service Term or a study-abroad equivalent will be required to do the domestic SST: Latino Studies program instead. Incoming students and current first-years will no longer have the option of taking SST alternate courses on campus. Unlike previous domestic SST units, the revised program will now last an entire school year as of fall 2012. Before, students in the program had to cram all 13 credits into a single semester, but now they will take seven credits in the fall and six in the spring....
January 26, 2012
For the Record 1/26 – A call to all first-years: let’s hang out!
Hypothetical situation: I’m sitting in the dining hall, eating my fair share of something that’s not fish, and a person I’ve never seen before, a first-year student perchance, walks in. Realistic reaction from me: instant judgment! As much as it pains me to admit it (OK, fine, it’s not much pain), I have a habit of immediately judging people based on their looks, attire, stride, entourage and general vibes I receive. I realize that this make me seem like a jerk, which very well could be true, but I have no remorse about that. Truly, if I feel bad about...
January 12, 2012
Students adjust to change in SST location
At the beginning of 2012, the decision to discontinue the Study-Service Term in Egypt was made official. Tom Meyers, director of international education, and the International Education Committee knew they needed to come to a conclusion about the safety of sending students to a nation in the midst of revolution by the beginning of the new year. Starting last January, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to protest government corruption, unemployment and poverty. Within months, the people overthrew a president who had been in power for 30 years. Various reports have speculated that the death toll within the first months...
January 12, 2012
Tanzania SST-ers revive chicken slaughtering experience in Goshen
Plucking chicken feathers wasn’t something Leah Thill, Indy Miller and Laura Krabill expected to do on their Study-Service Term in Tanzania last spring. During a visit to a service location one afternoon, however, they learned the process of turning live chickens into a meal for 13. On a warm March day, Thill, Miller and Krabill met with five other SST-ers in Mogabiri and were invited to a host family’s home for dinner. Sharing a meal with a family is an act of hospitality in Tanzania, and as a token of their appreciation the Goshen College students decided to buy two...
September 21, 2011
ASL, Spanish may both go on Peru SST
American Sign Language students might be trading the sunny beaches of Jamaica for the snowcapped mountains of South America. Tom Meyers, director of international education, will travel to Peru this month in hopes of setting up a dual-track Study Service Term program there, accommodating both students who are studying Spanish and those who are learning American Sign Language. After ASL students returned from SST in Jamaica last fall, Goshen College decided to end the program there. The short-lived Jamaica SST location started in the summer of 2007 and lasted for three terms. Jamaica was the first SST unit that was...
April 14, 2011
Tanzania and Peru SST returns
Almost 30 faces returned to the pool of Goshen students yesterday after a semester’s worth of traveling for Study-Service Term. Fifteen students safely returned from Tanzania and 14 returned from Peru. The Tanzania group arrived Wednesday afternoon around 3 p.m. The 7 remaining students of the group either traveled afterward or flew directly home. Tanzania 2011 was led by Ryan and Donna Sensenig with their two children, Mara and Isaac. The group spent the first six weeks of the term in the capitol, Dar es Salaam, studying Swahili and Tanzania’s culture. For the second half of the semester, students were...
March 31, 2011
Jamaica S.S.T. to be discontinued
Following careful deliberation, the Study Service Term (S.S.T.) Office decided that Jamaica S.S.T. will discontinue after three terms of running. The decision is primarily driven by not enough students showing interest in the program. On the most recent term to Jamaica in the fall of 2010, only nine students participated. “Simply put, we can’t sustain the program with so few participants,” said Tom Meyers, Director of International Education. A second factor of the discontinuation is the perception that Jamaica S.S.T. was exclusively for American Sign Language (ASL) students. Understandably, the program attracts many ASL students because it allows for interaction...
February 17, 2011
Students to travel to Palestine
This summer nine Goshen College students will journey to Bethlehem, bearing not frankincense and myrrh, but a keen curiosity to learn about Palestinian culture. These eight students, who have never been to the Middle East before, will stay with Marcelle Zoughbi, a sophomore at Goshen, and her family, in several apartments at the top of a mountain overlooking Bethlehem. Zoughbi and her friend Krista Kaufman, a junior, had the idea for this trip one night when they stayed up talking until 2 in the morning. They e-mailed a bunch of friends to see if anyone else would be interested in...
February 10, 2011
SST alternate courses alone no longer fulfill international education requirements
Students who choose not to do a traditional SST will now be required to do the Latino Studies SST instead. Faculty voted recently to eliminate the previous alternative to SST, which was to take SST alternate courses on campus. Now students will have just two options: they can either do a traditional SST in another country, or they can do the Latino Studies SST in Goshen. This change in requirements will apply to the incoming class of first-years in the fall of 2011. The Latino Studies program, which ran for the first time this past summer, will also undergo revisions....
February 5, 2011
Jan Emswiler’s journey to Goshen
Goshen College’s newest nursing professor might have a few words of advice for Ryan Sensenig and the Tanzania SST group. Jan Emswiler has only spent a year and a half in the United States since 1998—she spent the other 11 years in Tanzania. It all started between her sophomore and junior year of college, when she participated in Mennonite Central Committee’s SALT (Serving And Learning Together) program. SALT sent her to Tanzania for the first time. After graduating from Eastern Mennonite University in 1998, Emswiler heard that M.C.C. was looking for a nurse to go to Tanzania, so she volunteered....
January 20, 2011
Goshen students say goodbye to friends, hello to Tanzania, Peru
It was the middle of the night, but a few overhead lights illuminated smiles, tears and frantically waving hands as dozens of friends, roommates and family members bid adieu to spring SST students. A bus carried the 23 Tanzania-bound students from the Union shortly after 1 a.m. last Wednesday, Jan. 12. The spring 2011 Peru group also left the Union at around 6:30 the same morning. For many, the occasion was bittersweet. Laurel Woodward, a sophomore, acknowledged the challenging aspects of saying goodbye to close friends who left for SST. “It was harder than expected,” said Woodward, “because you form...
December 2, 2010
Changes in general education to integrate SST experiences
Goshen College is in the process of developing a new model for general education requirements. Most colleges reassess and improve their curriculum every 10 to 12 years. The current program has been in place at Goshen since 1998 and is now undergoing analysis and revision. The current ongoing revision began in the 2008-09 school year under the title, “Foundations of Excellence,” and was an assessment of the first year experience. Since then, the Gen-Ed Task Force has been working backwards, beginning by establishing outcomes for the program to deliver to students, and then designing a program that will achieve these...
December 2, 2010
Peru, Egypt and Jamaica SST students arrive home safely
The size of Goshen’s on-campus student body ballooned overnight as 32 students returned safely home last evening from their fall semester of Study Service Term (SST). Around 5 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, 14 students returned from the Egypt SST unit and nine students arrived from the fall Peru unit; six students stayed behind to travel in neighboring countries. Early Thursday morning, nine students arrived home from the American Sign Language unit in Jamaica. Friends and family greeted the SSTers with excitement as they arrived on campus after spending more than three months abroad. "Coming home is surreal but I was...