Alex Bradley's Interview

   Interview With Student Abroad in India
    Hannah Malloy is a second semester Junior at Goucher College currently undergoing a semester abroad in Bangalore, India. Growing up in rural Connecticut, her time in India is a massive cultural departure for her and can be considered what most would call an extreme case of a Goucher student abruptly “bursting the Goucher Bubble.” For this reason, along with my regard for her carefree yet often insightful articulate manner of expressing herself, I chose her to be my interviewee to help me gain a better understanding of the Goucher Bubble.
    Hannah’s experience at Goucher College had been quite like her life before college: quiet, somewhat isolated from the larger world, and culturally bland. Her semester abroad is changing all of that rapidly. Spending her first few weeks in India traveling the countryside with her American companions, it wasn’t until about a month into her trip she began to lay roots for her semester long stay. She quickly began to realize how insulating the so-called “Goucher Bubble” was for her.
        I caught up with Hannah via Skype and after catching up, began the Goucher Bubble questionnaire. Like many Goucher students, Hannah first discovered the school while college hunting as a high school senior. As a small, liberal arts, co-educational, and fairly nearby campus, Goucher seemed to be just what she was looking for. When she visited the campus, every faculty or administration member she spoke to brought up two major points. First, that Goucher promoted international exposure with its mandatory study abroad program, and second, that Goucher was intimately connected with the Baltimore community and other area colleges and programs. While Hannah can personally attest to the truth in the first point as she sits in an Indian Internet Café, the second point, she says, was an austere misrepresentation of the real situation.
    In Hannah’s five semesters at Goucher, she traveled to Baltimore city on only five occasions, and to DC only twice, despite having a twin sister enrolled at American University. She claims Goucher is severely lacking in resources and motivation to propel students off campus. She feels that she is missing out on,
 “…the potentially culturally enriching exploration of Baltimore metro and even Towson. Towson is in walking distance, but I never know what is happening around town in the community, or any social events. I don’t receive e-mails, I don’t see fliers; Goucher just seems totally cut off, even from Towson.”
Hannah feels that the Goucher Bubble doesn’t even extend past the front gate and into Towson, which engulfs the campus on all sides. She blames poor event exposure, a lamentable Collegetown Shuttle, limited Zip Cars, and a sketchy bus schedule for her lack of off-campus journeying.
    Hannah claims that although this feeling of isolation from the surrounding community does make Goucher seem like it exists in a bubble, she does like the intimacy that she feels results from such a high proportion of students living on campus and not heading home on weekends. Even though she feels almost totally cut off from local events, she believes Goucher maintains very strong ties to the global experience. Hot button issues are regularly discussed in formal and informal settings all over campus, she says, and the exposure these events get is more than sufficient to keep her up to date on global issues.
    India has changed Hannah. At first extremely nervous and in her words, “totally culture shocked”, she is now adjusting well to her new surrogate school, life, and friends. When I asked her if she felt Goucher pushed her out of her comfort zone she claimed she never felt that it had until she was soaring over the Atlantic Ocean en route to a country with one billion strangers on the opposite side of the globe. Feeling grateful to Goucher for maintaining its obdurate commitment to mandatory time abroad, she believes herself to be a better person already from the experience. Albeit the stifling effect the Goucher Bubble has on her sense of community, Hannah claims the small self-contained community’s benefits outweigh this concern.
    Hannah’s view on the perceived Goucher Bubble falls closely in line with my own. Having had much more global exposure than she before my tenure at college, I was not nervous about living in a centralized “bubble.” She raised the excellent point that Goucher seems to push on prospective students a Goucher with deep community connections even as many students feel this to be grossly untrue. Misrepresentation could be a major contributing factor to complaints about the “bubble.” I expected to be somewhat cut-off during my time at Goucher. If I prized global and local exposure over a small intimate campus I would have searched for a school in a major metropolitan center such as New York or Chicago.
Perhaps if the school offered a more accurate representation of Goucher’s true place in local affairs it would set more appropriate expectations for prospective students. After all, if Goucher is up front about what so many call “The Goucher Bubble”, those who hold rich cultural diversity and interconnectivity with outside communities as key components to their college experience will likely not choose Goucher to attend in the first place and therefore naturally won’t have the chance to attend Cultural Anthropology and complain about it. But this is unlikely to happen as it would lead to lower student population and therefore less $$$.


NOTE: Tongue in cheek