Bridge Year adjusts capacity, locations

The Bridge Year Program, which will continue to offer spaces in India and Peru, will also increase the total number of students the program can accommodate annually.

As part of the program, incoming freshmen defer their first year of enrollment and spend nine months engaging in service work abroad.

The expanded program will now allow seven students to visit each of the four countries. Since it began in 2009, 60 students have traveled abroad as part of the program.

Director of Bridge Year John Luria said the decision to increase student capacity is a result of increased enthusiasm from incoming freshmen.

According to Luria, the new locations in China and Senegal will follow the same general structure of the other locations but offer a variety of new opportunities for students to engage in service work, including healthcare, environmental conservation and education. Students will continue to live with local families.

“Through homestays, students are able to establish meaningful relationships, develop and master language skills and more fully engage with local society, which I think allows them to gain a much deeper understanding of the lives and experiences of local people,” Luria said in an email.

The news that the Bridge Year Program would offer locations in China and Senegal for the first time may also affect recruitment into the Programs in East Asian Studies and African Studies, the program directors said.

East Asian Studies Program director Stephen Teiser said the addition of China would bode well for heightened awareness of East Asia and increase participation in the program.

“Adding a location for the Bridge Year Program in Kunming, China, is a great development,” Teiser said in an email. “It may lead to more concentrators and certificates in East Asian Studies, and it will certainly augment involvement in East Asia — and international education broadly — at Princeton.”

African Studies Program Director Dan Rubenstein shared Teiser’s thought that the new program would increase the enrollment in his program. He also said the expansion would build on students’ service work in Africa.

“My experience with Bridge Year students having spent time in Africa is that they become passionate about all matters African and that this passion propels them to want to return to Africa and continue their formal learning or expand their activities to include research or internships,” Rubenstein said in an email.

English Professor Simon Gikandi, who is involved with the Program in African Studies, said Bridge Year students who spend a year in Senegal will gain a deep understanding of Africa that perhaps cannot be replicated in the United States.

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“I consider the Bridge Year Program to be central to the study of Africa in Princeton because it will inspire students who spend time in Senegal to continue to study Africa in one way or another,” Gikandi said in an email.

However, some students who went to the locations that had been eliminated said they thought next year’s Bridge Year participants may miss out.

“I was mostly just surprised and sad,” said Andres Parrado ’15, who went to Serbia on Bridge Year. “I thought Serbia was a great location, and I really enjoyed the work there.”

In Serbia, Parrado worked on service projects involving HIV prevention and youth empowerment. He said that because of Serbia’s history of isolation and the limited role it plays in international politics, spending the year in Serbia was a unique experience.

But Luria said he is confident that the program will continue to be able to provide students with a unique educational experience.

“In my opinion, Bridge Year offers a truly innovative approach to learning, one that is more experiential and perhaps more profoundly transformational than anything most of our entering students will have encountered in their high school years,” he said.