Julianna Kurpis, a Trinity University junior majoring in environmental studies and history, spent fall 2014 in Tanzania as part of the School for International Training Study Abroad program on conservation and political ecology. She stayed with a Tanzanian family, camped in national parks perilously close to lions and hyenas for more than 30 nights and lived with the Masai, an African people who inhabit Kenya and northern Tanzania, for four days.
She and her fellow students went on a safari and studied habits of animals in the park, including their feeding and mating behavior. They collected data on animal behavior, sometimes for days at a time; they learned how to track animals and identify them by their excrement.
Kurpis also worked on an independent research project. For three weeks, she studied changes in plant communities under different levels of canopy cover in a protected forest reserve in the mountains. Each day, she says, she walked through the forest with her guide setting up 10 feet by 10 feet plots and noting the composition and percentage coverage of plants and the heights and species of trees. She also estimated the density of the canopy.
“After collecting my data, I did some statistics and found that canopy cover greatly influences the composition and structure of plant communities below it,” says Kurpis, who aspires to work for a non-governmental organization some day.
Study abroad trends
Kurpis is part of a steady but relatively recent trend in study abroad programs. Students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines are driving the growth in Americans studying abroad.
For the first time, STEM majors outnumber study abroad students in other major fields. According to the Institute of International Education, in 2012-13, STEM students accounted for 23 percent of study abroad students, followed by social science majors (22 percent) and business majors (20 percent).
