We are the world: URochester students learn, work, and research across the globe

Winter break is a time to recharge, but it’s also the perfect chance for many URochester students to perform community service abroad.

For 15 years, members of the Sigma Chi fraternity have spent a week working in impoverished villages in the Dominican Republic. They’ve helped to construct a church, several houses, and more than 200 outhouses. Last January, URochester students helped build a cinder-block home for a single mother while donating 850 pounds of baseball equipment and toys for 600 children through collections made in Rochester. The students also raised more than $15,000 to pay for travel and materials. “It’s old-school manual labor, and the students learn about the economics and poverty in that area,” says Brian Cool, director of the University’s Catholic Newman Community and faculty advisor to Sigma Chi. “It’s a wonderful experience for everyone involved.”

Students in the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences can participate in the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, which addresses solutions to broad societal problems in sustainability, health, security, and knowledge. A global component is part of this program, and many join Engineers Without Borders, which partners with developing communities worldwide to improve lives through sustainable engineering work. The group has made numerous trips to the Dominican Republic, most recently in 2023, to purify a water system in a rural area left bacteria-ridden due to negligence following the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This was the real-world experience I needed,” says Hannah Rickert ’25, a biomedical engineering major who managed that project. “Where I grew up in Maine, there was no diversity. In the Dominican Republic, I had to be the translator because no one else in our group spoke Spanish. It was scary at first, but staying with host families and seeing how other parts of the world function or struggle to function was eye-opening and life-changing.”

Skylar DiBlasi ’25 loved going to Bermuda for archaeological field research—so much that she did it three times while at URochester. The New Jersey native was part of Professor Michael Jarvis’s Smith’s Island Archaeology Project, a six-week program that, since 2010, has focused on Bermuda’s early settlement history and broader Atlantic world connections, allowing students to gain hands-on experience in excavation, artifact analysis, archival research, and mapping.

“It changed everything for me,” says DiBlasi, who was a double major in archaeology, technology, and historical structures and classical civilization. “Archaeology is something you can’t understand until you literally get your hands dirty in the trenches. Some people think it’s the best thing ever. That was the case with me. This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

DiBlasi also was part of a student cohort that visited Italy in the summer of 2024 for a five-week summer excavation field school headed by Elizabeth Colantoni, an associate professor in the Department of Religion and Classics. The students spent two days in Rome, then traveled an hour northeast to the small town of Monteleone Sabino, where they lived in a local schoolhouse and worked at the archaeological site Trebula Mutuesca.

“Students love the experience of not just learning about the past, but getting to discover it themselves,” Colantoni says. “To uncover buildings and objects that no one has seen for perhaps 2,000 years and use that evidence to learn about new things from the past.”

Many University varsity teams try to go abroad every four years to ensure that each student-athlete enjoys the international experience.

The women’s soccer team has taken trips to England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Spain. The golf team played at Scotland’s legendary Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—one of the oldest courses in the world.  The men’s basketball team visited Spain in August and has previously traveled to Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The women’s basketball team has visited Puerto Rico and Barbados.

In addition to exhibition games against amateur and semipro squads, the teams enjoy guided tours and sightseeing, and often perform community service.

The field hockey team planted trees in Bermuda to help reforestation efforts and ran a youth sports clinic in Barbados to promote physical activity.

“Field hockey is incredibly popular globally, with more than two billion fans worldwide,” says head coach Wendy Andreatta. “Playing outside the US gives our student-athletes a chance to see how integral field hockey is to the communities we visit and make connections with athletes from all over the world.”

Each year, several URochester students are awarded national scholarships and fellowships for fully-funded experiences in virtually every corner of the world. Nominations are run through the University’s Student Fellowships Office.

The Fulbright US Student Program has sent URochester students to Vietnam, Taiwan, India, South Korea, Russia, and other countries to take part in English Teaching Assistantships and research-based projects. The DAAD RISE program offers students summer research opportunities at prestigious German universities and institutions. Over the past decade, seven URochester students have been selected as Schwarzman Scholars, receiving a one-year fully-funded master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

The experiences can be life-changing. Fulbright scholar Katie Hurwitz ’23 went to Athens, Greece, in 2023-24 as an English Teaching Assistant. She was a double major at URochester in music and interdepartmental studies—the latter a self-designed major. In Greece, she taught elementary school students and served as the music teacher at an English language summer camp while also teaching cello to second graders. “My Fulbright experience completely reshaped how I understand intercultural exchange and immersion,” says Hurwitz.  “I loved it.”

She loved Greece so much that she returned this fall—this time to Thessaloniki—as an elementary English fellow.

“Living abroad has taught me to slow down, lead with curiosity, and build relationships through humility and openness,” she says. “It’s been simply amazing.”