Students discuss study abroad cultural activity stipends

Around 40 to 45 percent of Tufts undergraduates study abroad during their junior year, and very often, they do so through Tufts programs. The university has programs in 10 different locations, and the expenses it covers vary depending on factors such as location, transportation availability and students' living situations.

Clarifying a misconception that the costs of studying abroad far exceed those of staying on Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus, Associate Dean of Programs Abroad Sheila Bayne said the costs of these programs are roughly equivalent to the fees at Tufts including tuition and room and board.

"On the bursar bill, you can see it’s divided into tuition and what they call comprehensive fee," she said. "How that is spent overseas depends on the program, but it should not cost you more than it would cost you to study at Tufts for a semester or a year.”

Bayne added that the financial aid package a student receives from Tufts also helps the student to go abroad.

“If you go to a Tufts program, whatever your financial aid package is, it goes with you 100% on a Tufts program,” she said.

According to Tufts' study abroad information website, a semester abroad through a Tufts program costs $31,849, and the price of participating in such a program for the full 2015-2016 academic year is $63,698.

However, Bayne believes that the Tufts programs are worth the costs.

"I always tell students that our Tufts programs we feel like, you know, they’re not the cheapest study abroad programs," she said. "Just like Tufts isn’t the cheapest school you could go to. But we feel like you get good value for money on a Tufts program, and I think that students who have attended these programs would agree with that. We offer a lot of things that other programs don’t.”

Though each of the Tufts Programs Abroad cost the same amount, they offer different monetary distributions to students throughout the program. Many of these stipends are given to students as food, cultural, travel and extracurricular allowances, as shown on the program website.

Madeline Krahn, a senior who studied under the Tufts in Paris program for a full year, believes that the stipend helped her better allocate her expenses.

“I thought the program was awesome,” Krahn, a double major in economics and international relations, said. “It’s frustrating because it’s so much money up front, but it does help you budget better. So I think the stipend was very useful to know that you would have the 450 euros per month.”

The monthly allowance given to students for food, distributed by each Tufts program's residential directors, depends on the program and whether students live in a homestay or in university housing, Bayne said. The amounts of these allowances vary according to how many meals are provided by host families as well as the local costs of food.

Many students attempted to budget and save these allowances to help with other costs during their time abroad. Robert Korycinski, a senior double majoring in Spanish and international relations, studied with Tufts in Madrid last spring. Like Krahn, he saw the monthly stipends as a useful budgeting tool.

“I would say food-wise the stipend was absolutely perfect for people who ate a lot like me,” Korycinski said. "For people who don’t eat quite as much, the food prices are so much lower in Spain that you can take some of that extra money and use it however you want ... So I wouldn’t change a thing about the reimbursement procedures.”

According to Bayne, the process for allocating allowance funds for cultural activities differs from program to program as well. Local residential directors are provided with funds to reimburse students for cultural activities. These activities can include concerts, plays, athletic events and museums, all of which showcase the country's culture. This is to encourage students to delve deeper into the culture around them.

“Each resident director has the fund and makes sure there are some group activities that everyone goes on, and then an opportunity to do something on their own," Bayne said.

These group excursions or activities, according to senior Sylvia Montijo, who studied with Tufts in Chile last year, help create a "home base" for students who are in different homestays and don’t often see each other.

“Once school is started and you move in with your host family, [these group activities] kind of to get us back together again, and you get free meals there, and you go to a cool place,” she said. “I think that students should take advantage of those. I don’t know for other programs how many cultural excursions they have, but we had a good amount of them.”

According to Korycinski, the Madrid program offers reimbursements for travel within Spain, including for expenses such as train or bus tickets. For the Paris program, however, the cultural reimbursement only accounts for the ticket costs of cultural events without travel, according to Krahn.

The reimbursements for travel also proved beneficial for students studying in Chile, where travel to other South American countries is very expensive, with hefty visa requirements. This financial obstacle is particularly pronounced in comparison to the lack of travel visa requirements within the European Union, Montijo said.

“We have a certain fund set up for travel,” she said. “So I went to the salt flats in Bolivia. That was probably the best experience out of my entire [time abroad].”

Though travel is covered for some programs, many students have still had to figure out how to commute to class. This proved to be another cost that students had to face if they lived far from their classes and their program fees did not cover expenses to get to and from class.

According to Montijo, transportation was one of the most significant costs she had to budget for during her time abroad.

“I think that may have been the biggest expense for all of us,” Montijo said. “Just transportation. I was one of two students able to get a student metro card out of the entire program...and that’s just because the faculty that we had a class with kind of sped up the progress for us. It usually takes a really long time. So instead of paying maybe $2.25 we paid 50 cents. But transportation really becomes a lot.”

According to Bayne, program fees also include orientations -- both at Tufts and on-site -- prior to the start of the program. These help students adjust to their home-stays, address health and safety concerns and introduce students to the culture.

"I think Chile has the longest program orientation out of all the Tufts programs," Motijo said. "That’s because Chile’s history is just so dense, and I really appreciate that about the program because there is just so much history going through, they give us time. Even two weeks isn’t enough."

Throughout the program students have their respective local residential directors for support, whether through managing their finances or adjusting to a new culture. Korycinski, however, wished he had more opportunities for feedback with administrators during his abroad experience.

"There was kind of that opportunity between our peer mentors," he said. "But I personally don’t know how often they met. We didn’t see as many of the administrators around as much as I would have liked."

After their programs abroad, all students are invited to submit written evaluations and attend debriefings with their residential directors and Tufts Programs Abroad to help accommodate new trends and concerns, Bayne said.

“We ask students to do a written evaluation," she said. “Then we have a debriefing meeting for each program, where Melanie Armstrong and I sit down with the students who have something to tell us, and often, it’s not a lot of students that come to those meetings.”

These debriefings prove necessary for addressing structural program changes and providing resources for students looking for immersive cultural experiences abroad.

“That’s very valuable for us because it’s kind of like a circle," Bayne said. "We run the program, it goes for that semester, the students come back and they have some ideas, suggestions or things come up that we hadn’t thought of. Then we work with the resident directors to make some changes, and we run it again and see how it works. Things are changing all the time, so the programs have to evolve just like anything else.”