January term opens travel opportunities for students

Dozens of local university students went back to school following the holiday break, trading campus lecture halls and labs for education venues in Hawaii and parts of Europe.

At Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa, this is the four-week Interim period. At Briar Cliff University in Sioux City, students call it J-term, short for January.

The time represents a nontraditional education challenge, one symbolized by the “1″ in a 4-1-4 academic calendar. You take four months of class the first semester, do J-term in the middle, and resume with four months of study in the second semester. Morningside College in Sioux City observes a 4-4-1 calendar with a “May Term” tacked at the end.

Students staying on campus at BVU and BCU often take one intensive course, covering a semester’s worth of material in four weeks. Other students trek to a job site, gaining valuable internship work experience in their chosen field. And then there are students like Scott Radke, who headed to Hawaii. Or Amanda Elbert, who lived in Italy. Or Ashley Henke, who marched to class on the sands of the Galapagos Islands. Ashley Henke, “You see animals there that you see nowhere else in the world,” said Ashley Henke, a senior biology major at Briar Cliff who spent January studying animals in the Galapagos Islands.Henke and her traveling companions, including two BCU professors, read a book before leaving and then spent time cataloging each species of plant and animal life they identified in their 3.5-day stay on the islands made famous by Charles Darwin.

via January term opens travel opportunities for students.