Winter Break, Well Spent

Three days after coming home for winter break, Shannon Hayes returned to Davidson College, then left for Morocco. She headed to Fez, where she did field work for her honors thesis, spending four weeks observing and interviewing young people about their dating practices and beliefs.

Winter break, one of the few unclaimed chunks of time in the calendar year, can offer students a chance to explore a new place, field, or interest. That can mean intensive research projects, purposeful treks, or shadowing alumni in their jobs.

“Having that time, where you’re not fully stressed out because you’re taking four classes, you want to explore, you want to try something new or really try to hone something you’ve started before. It’s a chance for you to risk-take,” says Karlene Burrell-McRae, dean of the college at Colby, where students participate in a three-week exploratory term called Jan Plan.

The New and Improved Winter Break

Home for the holidays? Maybe, but colleges are offering a lot of tempting alternatives: research and service-learning trips, externships, elective courses, and outdoor adventures. Sorry, Mom and Dad, we might just have to FaceTime this New Year’s Eve.

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Colleges across the country now offer study-abroad programs, service-learning trips, externship matching, introductions to industries, and guidance when students design their own winter-break explorations. And they help students afford them.

Travel Abroad

Ms. Hayes, the Davidson student, had studied in Morocco in the fall of her junior year. In her senior year, it became clear to her that she would need to travel back there to conduct the sensitive interviews she needed. She had never missed a Christmas with her family before. But with encouragement from her adviser to go for almost the entire break, she booked her ticket. She and her family FaceTimed on Christmas Day.

The extended stay was a good choice because she needed longer than she had planned to get young women to trust her enough to let her interview them. Another unexpected bonus: Traveling during that time of the year, when Moroccan universities are closed, she wasn’t among a swarm of American students in Fez. “I got to make local friends,” says Ms. Hayes, now a graduate student in Arab studies at Georgetown University. “I had a lot more exposure to the people and the culture. It pushed me out of my comfort zone.”

Davidson gave Ms. Hayes a grant through its Dean Rusk International Studies Program. For Ms. Hayes, the $1,563 was the difference between going and not.

Christopher Alexander, the director of the Rusk program, says winter-break grants are reserved for seniors who have not been abroad and for students like Ms. Hayes who need to travel for their thesis or capstone projects. Davidson gives nine or 10 such grants each winter break.

Service Trips

Winter-break service-learning trips are a way for students to combine helping people with experiencing a new place and culture.

Illinois State University offers alternative breaks during spring and winter. The winter offering started because students wanted to go abroad but spring break wasn’t long enough, says Annie Weaver, coordinator of student-volunteer opportunities in Illinois State’s Center for Community Engagement and Service Learning. While the spring-break trips are a week long, winter-break trips average 12 to 14 days. Students have gone to Mexico, Guatemala, and Costa Rica.

Part of her job is to make sure the students will be doing “strong, direct service” wherever they go, and not simply busywork or standing around. This year Illinois State is returning to Guatemala, where volunteers will help families build cement stoves with vents, a healthier alternative to cooking over open flames indoors.

Students stay with local families and pay their own way. The international breaks cost $1,300. Several years ago, Illinois State started offering a $250 domestic trip as well. This year that trip will take students to Kansas to serve in a shelter that helps women overcome addiction. In the past students have gone to Alabama and Florida.

Kyle Mast will be taking his second service trip to Guatemala this year. The international-business major likes the combination of service, meeting people, and international travel. This year he’ll go as a student leader. Part of his work will be to lead nightly reflections with other students on the work they did that day.

Career Sampling

For other students, winter break is a time to network and check out different industries and careers.

Job-shadowing externships offer students a chance to enjoy winter break, decompress, and then spend a week checking out a possible career path and potentially setting up a summer internship.

Robert Zipp, a senior at Swarthmore College, has done two winter-break externships and is set to do a third this January. In his sophomore year, he was one of four Swarthmore students who shadowed an alumna at the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, a nonprofit in New York City. He stayed with an alumnus in an apartment near Central Park.

Swarthmore has a longstanding externship program. Last year it sent 280 students to job sites around the country with alumni hosts. Other alumni host students in their homes during that week. The program, in place for 40 years and in its current form for about a decade, is popular, says Jennifer Barrington, assistant director of career education. More than half of Swarthmore students have done at least one externship by the time they graduate.

Externship placements have included an organic farm, a hospital, education nonprofits, and the World Bank.

“We can open doors they can’t get open themselves,” Ms. Barrington says.

Students spend the unpaid week shadowing employees, attending meetings, seeing what it is like to do a certain job. They may experience a variety of related workplaces — for example, one doctor takes students to five different hospital departments over five days so they can see the ER, surgery, and other specialties.

It’s an extensive undertaking that includes recruitment of alumni and parents as job and home hosts, and computer matching of students with their top job choices. The program has more demand than spots available. Last year, 470 students registered their interest, more than 300 alumni volunteered, and 280 students eventually went on externships. For some students who don’t get matched, the college assists them in finding their own externship.

If there is a positive connection and the professional would like the student to come for a summer internship, the student and the mentor can apply together for a paid fellowship from the career-services department. They must describe what the student hopes to learn and how she or he will do it.

Mr. Zipp returned to Harlem Educational Activities Fund the summer after his winter-break externship. There, he worked as a teaching assistant, created a writers’ workshop for students, and assisted the nonprofit with communications. He thought he wanted to get a teaching certificate but decided that he might be more interested in helping a nonprofit through fund raising or other support.

That kind of self-knowledge can be as beneficial as the work experience. “They need to try something out before they know they don’t want to do it,” Ms. Barrington says. “It’s all valuable data.”

And Mr. Zipp, who has a lot of interests and worked as the editor in chief of a Swarthmore newspaper, isn’t done exploring. This winter break, he’ll be shadowing someone at the online magazine Slate.

Road Shows and Jan Plan

Washington University in St. Louis takes students on two-day “road shows” that focus on a particular industry in a certain city or region. The trips, which include 20 to 25 students and two university staff members, go to Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, New York, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., says Mark W. Smith, dean of career services.

Students are responsible for getting to the city, where they meet up with the group and travel to different companies, agencies, and workplaces, often meeting alumni who work there. They learn about the company, about different jobs, and have a chance to ask questions.

It’s also a chance to introduce companies to Washington University and get them to recruit on campus, Mr. Smith says. Smart, engaged students are excellent ambassadors, especially after their mandatory training beforehand to maximize their professionalism. “It’s a great way to showcase your school,” he says.

The program is expensive because two staff members accompany each trip. Students are responsible for their own transportation and lodging, but funds are available through deans’ offices and donations for students who cannot afford the cost.

During Colby College’s three-week Jan Plan, students can take a course outside their area of study, travel abroad with college faculty members, do independent research, or hone their professional skills with an internship or other work experience in a new city.

Students can study African music or multicultural literacy, travel to Belize to study ecology or Bermuda to study geology, or take a class like narrative film or meteorology taught by alumni or other visiting professionals who only teach during the winter term. Students can also be matched with alumni working in their field of interest for a short internship.

Ms. Burrell-McRae, the college dean, sees the career and world exploration as an issue of equity. By offering these experiences, and linking students to alumni or faculty members in their fields, the college is helping all students create the kind of networks that some may have through family connections.

Students are required to do Jan Plan in three of their four years, but most opt to do it in all four, the college says. First-year students are required to be on campus for it. Colby is working on expanding the out-of-class experiences for the 60 to 70 percent of students who stay on campus for the January term. Last year it created a Jan Plan program that included trips to museums in Portland, and skiing and snowboarding. For students who have never skied or snowboarded before, the college provided lessons and even lent them proper gear.

Since January in Maine can be cold and dark, Colby wants to encourage students to go outside, move, and get fresh air for their physical and mental health, says Ms. Burrell-McRae — to “keep students active and engaged outside their dorm rooms.”