College Students' Web View of the World

Our Dispatches From the Next Generation correspondent Kelly Sutton is finally back in the U.S. after studying abroad in Germany. He wrote about some homecoming observations:

The Christmas season is the traveling season. I had an epiphany while traveling across the state of Washington with my family, listening to conservative talk radio only interrupted by high-tension power lines. There's something about tech, specifically the 'Net, that made me want to pack up and leave the U.S. for five months last year.

Apparently I wasn't the only one leaving. According to a recent New York Times article, study abroad rates are twice what they were nearly ten years ago. The mentality of students nationwide has morphed. Thanks to the Web students' worlds have shrunk. And it continues shrinking: When I discussed Thomas Friedman's acclaimed The World Is Flat with friends, we agreed with a resounding "duh."

The Internet especially encourages students to skip the country. For those homesick, Skype will always keep friends and family just a kooky dial tone away. For the adventurous, sites like Wikitravel give others a reason to explore and document the unknown. The site itself is autodescriptive: it's a travel guide in wiki format. I now contribute to every city that I visit. Every missing local restaurant recommendation or undiscovered neighborhood is a new challenge.

But Wikitravel is not the only piece of Web 2.0 that makes Friedman's "Globalization 3.0" concept true. It feels like the entire world has been documented -- in English -- online. If a soon-to-be student abroad is unsure of what the main train station looks like in Cologne, she can locate it on flickr's world map and be overwhelmed by dozens of pictures.

For the first time in history, more and more programs are being offered for science majors, us nerds. Using my own Loyola Marymount as a case study, half a dozen programs popped up in the last two years designed specifically for cloistered engineers and the like. Studying abroad used to be reserved for foreign language and art history majors; now fellow geeks indulge in "PC bangs" while studying computer science at Sogang University in Seoul.

American abroad programs fell behind long ago. Maybe it was the lack of interest. Maybe it was the notion that science students don't need to get out of the country. That's beginning to change. These science and usually technologically-minded students bring with them an entirely unique worldview. The same guys and girls that compute vector calculus and gravities in their heads now have the opportunity to struggle trying to explain the same concepts to native friends they meet while abroad.

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