A record 110 Pomona College students spent the fall 2025 semester studying in such countries as Brazil, Greece, Morocco, Sweden and Taiwan.
Sagehens last semester participated in 33 programs in 26 countries, their time abroad equal parts exhilarating, challenging and transformative.
The International and Domestic Programs Office (IDPO) collaborates closely with academic departments to ensure high quality programs are available for students from every major.
Programs also provide high impact experiential learning through coursework, research, field trips, internships, homestays, language immersion, athletics and more.
“Pomona College students have a wide range of opportunities to engage with global perspectives, diverse cultures, languages and critical issues through study away,” says Nicole Desjardins Gowdy, senior director of international and domestic programs.
“The insights and understanding students gain through study away enriches not only their own learning,” Gowdy adds, “but also on-campus classroom experiences as returnees share new perspectives with their peers and faculty.”
We spoke with three Pomona students in October to see how they were settling into their host cities and new learning environments.
We spoke with them again in January, when they returned to campus for the spring semester, to hear how studying abroad deepened their appreciation for other cultures and developed their awareness of local and global issues.
Will Dunham ’27, Jordan
Will Dunham ’27 may hail from Maine, but long before spending the fall semester in Jordan, he got a head start on living and studying abroad.
Dunham recalls living in Lithuania as a toddler, his mother a foreign service officer posted there. “She would pick me up from preschool and I’d be running around speaking Lithuanian,” he says.
When Dunham was 7, his family moved to Bulgaria, where once again he acquired a new language in school. “I haven’t used it since,” he admits, “so I don’t remember much.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Dunham is majoring in international relations and working his way toward a Middle Eastern studies minor. He’s spent the past two years studying Arabic because it’s in demand for all types of jobs.
“It’s also cool,” he says.
Dunham explored Pomona’s study away opportunities in Jordan and Morocco before deciding on Jordan “because the Arabic they speak is closest to the Modern Standard Arabic,” he says.
“And I also heard the people in Jordan were absolutely wonderful.”
In the capital city of Amman, Dunham settled in with a host family that included quadruplets—three boys and a girl, all his age. He mainly spoke Arabic with his host mom—“An incredible woman,” he says—and the two often went for outdoor walks or to the mall.
And, with typical Jordanian hospitality, she would ask at meals, “Do you want more?”
Dunham adjusted to a Sunday through Thursday school week, his classes centered on geopolitics, including Jordan’s recent political reforms. During his last month in Jordan, Dunham conducted an independent research project exploring through interviews how the reforms had impacted youth engagement in the political process.
“It was really, really enlightening,” he says. “If I’d just been doing pure academic research on the reforms, I would have come to one conclusion. But going out and talking to these five different people, I came to a very different conclusion.”
Dunham’s program offered excursions to major sites within Jordan. He was able to float while reading a book in the Dead Sea, and ancient Petra evoked the world of Indiana Jones. The students also went beyond Jordan, to Istanbul, which Dunham found “so awesome.”
Heading into his study abroad semester, Dunham hoped to gain a new perspective on the world. What he experienced was “the busiest, most eventful few months of my life,” he says.
“Every day was something new.”
Jasmine Harrison ’27, Scotland
Jasmine Harrison ’27 wasn’t sure she could handle being away from Southern California, even if only for a semester.
Her life was here, after all. Friends, sunny skies, her hometown Los Angeles an hour away.
But studying abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland, would connect the English and psychology double major to her literary interests and give her the chance to visit a country tied to the Harry Potter universe of which she’d long been a fan.
After much consideration, Harrison packed her warmest clothes, a Walter Scott novel and left Claremont for the United Kingdom ahead of the fall semester.
“For the first couple of weeks I was so stressed because it was a struggle to find people to hang out with,” she recalls. “But I found that if you let go of expectations, you can let your experience be what it’s going to be.”
Harrison walked everywhere in Scotland—and often to the tune of bagpipes played by street musicians. She passed green spaces and libraries, cafés and castles. She once stumbled across a witch shop plucked straight out of a Harry Potter novel.
“It was so beautiful there,” she says. “Even just walking to class, I was in awe the whole time. And I kept discovering new things around the city that I didn’t know were there. I would look around and say, ‘This is beautiful.’”
The Pomona College Edinburgh Program encourages self-guided learning, so after lectures, Harrison would head to a café to study. She balanced coursework with leisurely activities, and local pubs became a nice third space to hear good music, eat good food and socialize.
Before leaving for the UK, Harrison researched traditional Scottish cuisine—the results less than appetizing, she jokes. It took her a month to work up the courage to try haggis, the Scottish pudding made from the lungs, liver and heart of sheep.
“They made ways to make it more palatable,” she says. “But they love their haggis bon bons, haggis burgers, haggis pies.”
Harrison returned to Southern California after her semester abroad with dozens of postcards, a newfound love of tea and “a deep sense of courage,” she says.
“Studying abroad helped me grow as a person,” she adds. “I never thought I’d be able to do it, and I had some struggles at first adjusting to a new place. But I wouldn’t give up any of the challenges I had there because I came out of them so much happier and willing to try new things in a way I wasn’t willing to before.”
Emmett Levine ’27, Cameroon
Emmett Levine ’27 had three criteria for choosing where to study abroad.
“A place I had not been before, likely would not have been able to go on my own, and was completely different from anything I already knew,” he says. “I wanted a place where I wouldn’t be able to understand life there without being in it.”
Levine, a computer science major from New York City, spent his semester abroad in Cameroon, an African country whose infrastructure, public transportation and social relationships coalesce into a steep learning curve for travelers.
“There were a couple environmental changes that were pretty severe,” he says, “but I knew it’d be a different life and take some adjusting.”
Beyond burnishing his French and studying Cameroon’s colonial roots at the Middlebury School, Levine sang with a local band on weekends. He played soccer on dirt fields with new friends and ate his fill of such native fare as plantains and rice, yuca (a starchy root vegetable) and fried fish.
“When you’re abroad, the learning environment is very much everyday life,” Levine says. “You’re going to end up learning so much more from adjusting to a new environment than from the classes you end up taking.”
While in the capital city of Yaoundé, Levine learned to appreciate the quiet moments between classes and his adopted extracurriculars. He grew increasingly comfortable being alone in smaller spaces with a cup of tea in his hand, a journal to his right and a book to his left.
Levine kept two journals abroad—one for daily musings and another to jot down the values he found most important that day.
“Once I started taking things slowly and inviting some space for intuition,” he says, “I was able to have more creative thoughts and the space to act on them. I had more time to reflect and learn what matters to me.”
After completing his program, Levine stayed in Cameroon and learned woodworking and tailoring, hobbies he says inspired him to learn more about where things come from and appreciate the effort creating something—like his new favorite mug—takes.
“Being in Cameroon expanded my idea of the types of opportunities out there to use the skills you have,” Levine says. “This is the experience I wanted, and if this region of the world is something I want to explore again, I feel a lot more confident being able to do it on my own.”