This summer, Earl Warren College senior Sandra Gutierrez stepped off a worn bus onto the cold, wintry grounds of Valparaíso, Chile. The scene was slightly chaotic, as she and 23 other students waited to meet their host families.

Although Gutierrez speaks highly of her experiences in Chile, she was taken aback by the low number of Latino participants in her program. Out of 150 students, only four others were Latino.

During her six-week stay in Chile, Gutierrez learned that several host families who had been accommodating foreign students for years had never housed a Latino student. In discussions with some of her fellow study-abroad companions she came to realize that many of them shared her observations.

These circumstances fueled her decision to become involved with the Programs Abroad Office at UCSD, where she is currently a student assistant. Alongside her office duties, she plans to reach out to minority students in order to increase their numbers abroad as well as combat false impressions they may have about overseas travel.

“I think there are a lot of misconceptions about the prices and being able to take classes and still graduate on time,” Gutierrez said. “I want to see what more effective forms we can use to encourage Latino students.”

Kimberly Burton, director of the Programs Abroad Office, noted that one goal of the program is to keep the number of minority students abroad at least consistent with the number of minority students in actual attendance at UCSD.

According to UCSD’s 2007 enrollment statistics Latinos and Mexican-Americans make up 12 percent of the student body.

PAO offers three different study abroad programs, each with a slightly different approach to overseas education: the Education Abroad Program, Opportunities Abroad Program and Global Studies.

Gutierrez, like many other study-abroad students, always knew that she wanted to travel, and although she was extremely active in making it a reality when she came to UCSD, there were still obstacles that she had to surmount.

“I can say that on my behalf it was somewhat of a financial issue, maybe a cultural issue,” Gutierrez said. “I know that [going abroad is] not something that happens very often within the Latino culture.”

Gutierrez noticed that most of the white students she met in her program had gone abroad prior to visiting Chile.

“In my immediate family I’m the first one to go to a different country,” Gutierrez said. “Then I realized that for a lot of other students it was like nothing for them. Obviously there’s a bigger level of acceptance outside of Latino culture.”

Eleanor Roosevelt College freshman Lauren Havens participated in a community service program in Latin America while in high school. She does not foresee any obstacles when introducing the idea of travel abroad to her parents, and is already looking into options such as Spain, Italy or Brazil.
“My dad did a year in Brazil when he was in high school, so they better understand,” Havens said.

Meanwhile, Gutierrez said that convincing her parents of her overseas plans was difficult.

“It was hard to explain the process to them,” she said. “What I was going to be doing; if I was going to be safe. For other cultures it might be something more normal or expected of the students to do.”

Language barriers may also prevent parents from fully comprehending the students’ plans, according to Gutierrez.

“All the information is in English so I had to translate everything and explain everything and help them understand what I was getting myself into,” Gutierrez said.

To address this issue in the past, EAP produced a Spanish version of an informational document that students could give to their parents.
Additionally, Burton explained that some minority students are their families’ first generation enrolled in college.

“For many of these students it’s such a big deal to get accepted to UCSD,” Burton said. “For a lot of them, thinking of going abroad is like thinking of going to the moon, it’s such a foreign concept for them, and that’s part of the struggle.”

Consequently, the issue of parental consent and understanding has become a much more important issue for PAO in the past few years. Last spring, the office held its first orientation session for parents, which ran alongside its general orientation program. According to Burton, the program was a success.

Many parents, explained Burton, fail to grasp the extent of the benefits of going abroad, which can expand options for post-graduation plans and provide an opportunity for students to augment a textbook education with cultural understanding.

Other steps that are being taken to overcome barriers preventing minority students from studying abroad include group discussion sessions and surveys that could help identify some of the more pertinent issues.

A diversity focus group, organized by PAO, will meet on Oct. 24 to connect students of diverse ethnicities who have been abroad. In these sessions, students discuss topics such as what motivated them to go abroad, why they chose their particular destination and how participation numbers of minorities can be improved.

Gutierrez, in her coming efforts to increase awareness and encourage minority students to study abroad, hopes to start educating students earlier about the opportunities that await.

By informing students while they are still in high school, Gutierrez aims to prepare them for the sometimes tedious process of keeping up with deadlines and meetings that inevitably come with the act of going abroad so as to ease the process and assure their place in the foreign sphere.
Gutierrez hopes that for minority families, informing parents early on through continued parent conferences may help bridge the cultural and language barriers that are often deterring factors.

When Gutierrez first met her host family, they immediately welcomed her warmly into their home. Everything from different eating times to having to manually heat up water before taking a shower was a new experience for her.

“Now I’ve realized that you should pretty much get as much as you can out of your higher education,” Gutierrez said. “I seriously felt that in the whole K-12 plus through UCSD years I had never learned as much history as I did there and actually standing at a point where something happened.”