11/17/2009 - Year off from school doesn't mean year off from learning
By PAMELA MAREAN for SouthCoast Today
By now, the class of 2009 has settled into whatever routine they’re following post-high school. College freshmen have gotten to know their roommates. Those joining the workforce are adapting to the quirks of their bosses. Job hunters are revising their resumes. And some adventurous 18-year-olds are exploring the cultures of other countries during what is commonly called in Europe a “gap year.”
One SouthCoast family has a long tradition of traveling and hosting travelers through AFS International. Charles McKim “Kim” Mitchell, an attorney specializing in elder affairs who lives in Fairhaven, has three children. Two of them spent a year each in Paraguay, South America, before going on to college.
Kim Mitchell himself grew up with visiting “AFS brothers” from Italy, Austria and Japan with whom he still keeps in frequent contact.
Mitchell’s youngest child, Sam Mitchell, deferred admission to the University of Vermont to take a trip he hoped would better focus him on what he wanted to study. While a student at Falmouth Academy, he’d excelled in math and science at first, only to later find himself drawn to the humanities and the study of French.
Sam said his college adviser encouraged him to pursue a year abroad because, he said, “her logic was that you shouldn’t live in the same place doing the same thing for your entire life.”
So, following in his older sister Amelia “Mia” Mitchell’s footsteps, he volunteered with AFS to go to Paraguay (the only year-long program they offer) to work with underprivileged children ages newborn to 6 years in the “kind of place that doesn’t exist in our society,” Sam explained.
At a pseudo-orphanage/daycare in Paraguay’s capitol city of Asuncion, he helped feed, comfort and teach the sons and daughters of parents who had to be away for days at a time to fulfill the terms of their employment. Most of the parents worked as household domestics, he said.
Back home and attending the University of Vermont, 20-year-old Sam said he’s still not sure what he’ll major in, but anthropology and Spanish are high on his current list of interests. Instead of giving his outlook on the future a more narrow focus, Sam said, “This year abroad removed some options and added many new ones. It changed the way I see the world and see my relationships with other people.”
Youth overseas have long appreciated the tradition of traveling between high school and college to experience the world.
But in the U.S., Director of International Recruitment Bill Colvin of the College-Bound Network said adventures such as Sam’s “might be becoming popular for the first time.”
He cited the 50,000 discrete inquiries the Network’s web site (www.collegebound.net) got this month for its volunteer abroad program information.
Colvin and his colleague, Michael Mesheriakov, vice president of analytics, suggested that the travel bug may be hitting U.S. young adults because of the economy’s dismal employment forecasts. Over the summer and into the fall, inquiries about College Bound’s expeditions climbed steadily each month from approximately 30,000 in June.
Those figures, Mesheriakov said, may point to growing desperation among new high school graduates as months passed with no jobs on the horizon. Colvin commented, “The economy is definitely a driving factor.”
Furthermore, he noted that as college curricula become more “internationalized” gap year experiences are perceived as “resume-builders.” More worldly young adults stand out in the crowd of competitors for both college and workplace applications.
The most widely known volunteer abroad organization is probably the Peace Corps, which was started by then-Senator John F. Kennedy who presented the idea to University of Michigan students as a novel way to serve their country and the cause of international peace. However, the average age of the estimated 195,000 participants over the last half century is post-college, between 25 and 27 years old.
Today’s students venturing out are as young as 13, according to AFS International, which specializes in semester or trimester-long travel for high school sophomores and juniors and is getting requests for shorter trips for even younger groups.
Kim Mitchell’s father, Raymond McKim Mitchell, helped found a New Bedford chapter of AFS in 1953 after he returned from volunteering with the organization as an ambulance driver. Raymond Mitchell oversaw 120 cohorts from 1943-1945 during World War II when AFS was known as the American Field Service.
After the war-to-end-all-wars, AFS repurposed itself to encourage youngsters from war-ravaged nations to come to the U.S. in an effort to prevent future aggressions. Raymond and his wife Marian Price Mitchell believed in the mission so intensely that they hosted the three youngsters who their son Kim would come to call “brothers.”
Of his father’s AFS involvement, Kim Mitchell said, “It may be an oversimplification, but I think the horrors of war that he experienced convinced him, as it did so many others with AFS, that he had to do something to foster world peace. The great premise of the organization is that it is creating world peace one relationship at a time.”
Sam’s older sister Mia Mitchell said she chose to take a gap year in Paraguay with AFS because it was an organization she knew well. “Both my Dad and my grandparents talked about it.” She spent her time assisting human rights lawyers with the Organization of American States, a non-governmental group.
Mia was inspired to put off going straight to college because, she reflected, “I was looking to do something not necessarily academic for a year but still meaningful. When I took my gap year (in 2006-2007) few others were doing it.”
Now a junior at Smith College, Mia is studying economics and international relations. She is investing another year in experience beyond the campus by interning in Washington D.C. with the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor this semester. Next semester she’ll jet to England for a semester at Oxford University.
Mia said she understands the value of her internship and projected studies abroad because of her gap year experience. “Partly it has to do, broadly speaking, with a recognition of how interconnected and global things are. Knowing other cultures and other languages helps me better understand how different governments work,” she explained.
“More and more people should study abroad if they can,” she advised.
Marlene Baker with AFS International (www.afs.usa.org) said they are seeing an increase in students who are making up their minds much more quickly to travel and study abroad. She attributes this to a post-Sept. 11, 2001 change in focus from “adventure, travel, fun to ‘I can make a real difference in the world.’”
Though gap year (and shorter) travel experiences can cost several thousand dollars, Baker said that most programs like AFS offer fundraising workshops and scholarships are available for some destinations.
Participants like Mia and Sam regard the experience as priceless. Whether they travel for several weeks or for an entire year, Baker said, “I’ve never had a kid come back and say they wished the program was shorter.”
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