American Odyssey

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious heroine who traveled far and wide through Center City after she left the famous campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Many shops did she visit, and many were the shops with whose manners and customs she was acquainted; moreover she meandered down to the sea, but do what she might she could not find a ferry to Camden.

And thus my Odyssey off campus abruptly ended last Sunday afternoon at the Delaware River, after I couldn't find the ferry to South Jersey. I spent my 40-block epic adventure off campus thinking about how lucky I was to have traveled a bit in my lifetime. "How have I changed?" I Mused.

Namely, I've left the Philadelphia area for an extended period of time just once in my life -- to attend the University of Rochester my freshman year in upstate New York. Rochester gave me the opportunity to experience a new region of the country, meet new people and breathe fresh air from the Kodak plant down the street. It was great for a semester or two, and then I realized I needed to come home because I missed Philadelphia.

Going to Rochester was a lot like studying abroad in many respects. Like those who leave Penn to study overseas, I was intellectually stimulated. I immersed myself in another culture, made new friends from different backgrounds and came to Penn with a new perspective on the world.

Everyone should get the opportunity to leave Penn for a semester or a year, but not everyone has the financial means or meets the citizenship requirements or has the ability to leave the United States because of their academic program. Solution? A Domestic Exchange program.

Domestic Exchange is exactly what it sounds like, studying domestically at another university in the United States for a year or a semester. Go to that school you fell in love with on the admissions tour your senior year of high school and were itching to go to until your parents told you Palo Alto is too far away to apply. See a rural area for a bit. Try out a region where you'd like to be after graduation. Hang out on the beaches of SoCal. Just leave Philly for three months.

Other schools have Domestic Exchange programs. In California, Harvey Mudd College students can spend a year or a semester at Swarthmore or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in freezing New York. Nice little change of scenery. Agnes Scott College students can study at Mills College. And Spelman College students in Atlanta have the opportunity to study for a semester at Duke, Dartmouth, Stanford and 25 other colleges across the United States.

Even graduate students at Penn have the opportunity to participate in a program called the Exchange Scholar Program. The program "enables a graduate student enrolled in a doctoral program in one of the participating institutions to study at one of the other graduate schools for a limited period of time so as to take advantage of particular educational opportunities not available on the home campus." Participating schools include Berkeley, Brown, the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Yale and Harvard.

Undergraduates at Penn would benefit from a similar program. There are departments and courses at other schools that are not available here. Different types of people attend all of these institutions. Each school has a different climate, professors and traditions.

There are those who will say that students cannot immerse themselves in a different culture without going to a foreign country and learning a new language. However, the two most popular destinations for study abroad last year were the United Kingdom and Australia, where students speak English. In fact, I would argue that the cultural differences between a rural college in Iowa and an an urban college in Philadelphia are just as great, or greater than, those between Penn and a school in London.

There are many different cultures in the United States that I know I am not aware of. I've never been to the South or the Midwest or New England for more than a day, and even then, I stayed in a hotel in a city, not a rural area.

So when I start my next Odyssey, I'll ask my Muse to take me slightly farther than a ferry ride to Camden. Let's just hope I don't meet Poseidon.

Melody Joy Kramer is a junior English major from Cherry Hill, N.J. Perpendicular Harmony appears on Wednesdays.

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