For years, Brown's Office of International Programs has offered a wide range of credit-bearing study abroad opportunities to undergraduates. While tremendously valuable, these experiences can interrupt collaborative partnerships between Brown students and faculty. The University has therefore looked for ways to help students integrate their experiences abroad with the intellectual life of the campus here in Providence.

To this end, Brown has created the Global Independent Study Program, which extends meaningful student/faculty collaboration well beyond College Hill to all five continents. Students going abroad work in advance with Brown faculty to develop independent study projects that become an integral part of their course loads abroad. To give a semblance of the kinds of projects that could be developed, imagine the following scenarios:

In this way, the study abroad experiences becomes not an interlude between semesters at Brown but an integral part of the "Brown experience."

Brown offers well over 400 courses that focus on issues, events, and themes that fall outside U.S. borders. Faculty members who teach these courses are, in many cases, heavily involved in research projects with international distinguished scholars around the world. Such faculty are ideal partners for students who wish to integrate a Global Independent Study into their abroad experience.