In 1962, along with 10 other Washington University students, I boarded an aging student ship in New York bound for Strasbourg, France, to participate in the university’s first Junior Year Abroad in France. In 1984, as a WUSTL lecturer of French and director of the Internship in European Business Program, I boarded a jetliner to Paris with 12 other Washington University students, a trip I was to repeat for 23 years. That initial transatlantic crossing in 1962 launched me on a year of discovery and on a career that now in 2013 has given me a 50-year perspective on study abroad.
In France, those of us in that inaugural study-abroad program were mostly on our own. The protective role played by universities now barely existed then. We had no one to go to with minor problems, and no Washington University representative came to Strasbourg after the first week.
Read the full story in Washington Magazine: Remembering the First Study-abroad Program in 1962