J-Term Practica: Peru Wrap Around, 2016
April 6, 2016
The 29-day J-term Peru trip was an unprecedentedly inspiring experience which came just in time. In the preceding fall semester (my first semester at MIIS), as an international transfer undergraduate student, I was struggling to fit into the MIIS grad-school community: I was usually too unconfident and uncomfortable to speak in class or talk to my classmates or professors outside of the classroom. Therefore, I participated in the J-term Peru Practicum primarily in order to develop interpersonal and intercultural communication skills and teamwork capabilities.
Since this J-term practicum is built on the field methods course in the fall semester and all MIIS participants are students who have taken Intro to Policy and Data Analysis and field methods in the fall semester, by the time we arrived at Peru I’d already known most of my teammates for a whole semester and worked with them for half of the semester on designing the contents for the trip.
During the trip, the seven of us MIIS students and two Middlebury students stayed together with a local Spanish-speaking host family. We worked on our tasks as a team and enjoyed our life as a family, and there were so many meaningful memories: I lost my luggage on the day of our arrival and my Spanish-speaking Peru-experienced teammates helped me get to a local supermarket to purchase basic necessities; I learned Spanish little by little from my teammates and managed to have simple conversations with our host parents in español, etc. In the beginning, I felt that my contribution to our team project was limited as I couldn’t speak Spanish. The program, however, was designed that non-Spanish speaker could contribute by taking on specify responsibilities, like observation and data management. In the end, I felt grateful that I contributed as much as I could and that my contribution was appreciated by my teammates and the professor and the organization that we were working with.
After the J-term, I feel much more confident and comfortable to work in the team project and to participate in class. This experience prepared me for the Sprintensive program that I’m participating in during this semester, where 30 students attend the same classes for four hours everyday during weekdays and get graded mostly based on teamwork. Moreover, I developed a deeper understanding of our research topic, which is how climate change is affecting the high-altitude agricultural community as well as of social science field research and usage of the data analysis. It is valuable to me because I’m thinking of pursuing a career in relevant fields.
In general, the J-term Peru Practicum is a meaningful learning experience for both personal and professional reasons. I would love to participate in similar programs again and would recommend this program to other MIIS students.
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