Two Siena students travel far to study

Two students at Siena College are far away from the Loudonville campus this semester: They are studying in Jamaica and China.

Siena has 82 students studying abroad; the ones in China and Jamaica for their overseas semester are the first to go to those countries.

Via email, The Evangelist interviewed the two students about their current locations and future plans.

Study and work

Stephanie Davis, an English major from Brooklyn, chose Jamaica through the International Partnership for Service-Learning and Leadership, a worldwide association of colleges that offers academic study and volunteer service abroad to give students a "fully integrative study-abroad experience" (see www.ipsl.org).

With her experience this winter, Stephanie hopes to become a better teacher because she believes that children "need to know that life is more than their neighborhoods."

She looks at the opportunity to spend several months in Kingston, Jamaica, as a way to do community service and investigate the education process in an area beset with "problems with poverty and violence."

Service component

While studying at University Technology this semester, Stephanie will do 15-20 hours of volunteer community service, allowing her to work with the poor in Kingston.

"I just started my service last week at a school for children from the ages of three through six," she said in her email. "The children are very active, and they mimic a lot of the things they see. Many of them pretend to be police and hit other students; the police here aren't well liked.

"I think downtown Kingston needs help because it is so poor. Once you enter some areas, you see houses without doors, toddlers walking the street begging, people lying on the sides of the road. Downtown, people openly sell drugs."

Water, please

Stephanie told The Evangelist that "I was really sad because, one day as we were walking [and I was carrying a bottle of water], this little girl who could be two years old followed me, reaching for the water bottle. I gave her some, of course, but just knowing that children are begging for water was shocking to me."

When she graduates, Stephanie hopes to work with children that are "a little behind [and] problem children."

She believes that her service time in Jamaica will help her understand their needs.

China time

Half a world away, in Hong Kong, Gavin Flynn is trying to get used to the fast pace of a big city.

A marketing management major from Copake Falls, he is the first Siena student to receive the Freeman Award, given by the Institute of International Education, an independent non-profit organization involved in the international exchange of people and ideas.

The Freeman Award is presented to undergraduate students who wish to study in Eastern and Southeast Asia.

Why Asia?

In his email, Gavin said that he chose China for several reasons: "Ever since I was a kid, I have been interested in the culture of Southeast Asia. Hong Kong is one of the epicenters of Asian business, making it a natural choice for me. Plus, it is a former British Colony; the language barrier is lessened since most of the six million residents speak English."

He is just beginning classes at City University of Hong Kong. Before doing so, he traveled with a group of students to Beijing, Shanghai and Xi'an, home of the famous terra cotta warriors.

"It was a big case of culture shock at first," he wrote. "Xi'an is the ancient capital of the dynasties, [and their] history dates back thousands of years. However, in modern times, the city is an industrial hub and just starting to experience some of the reforms that have caused the [economic] booms.

"It's still a bit rustic. We visited a farm village just 20 minutes outside the city, and I was astonished to discover everything was done by hand, including the harvesting of crops."

Future work

After his graduation in 2007, Gavin hopes to "go on to work in either marketing or for the State Department as a diplomat," but "law school or grad school isn't out of the picture. All I know is that I want to travel a lot in my career."

Right now, he said, he's "falling into the grind of a fast-paced Hong Kong lifestyle."

(1/27/05)