Swiss study abroad program immerses design students in new cultures
Students who want to take part in USU’s Summer Design Program in Switzerland need to act quickly: Within two hours of enrollment opening for this year’s program, 37 students signed up, filling the program.
The program has grown in popularity since it began in 2002, and it’s now the largest and longest-running Study Abroad program at Utah State, said Bob Winward, associated professor of graphic design and the program’s organizer.
“It was the sweetest summers I’ve ever had in my life,” said Ben Evjen, a USU graduate who participated in the program in 2005 and 2006. “It was an awesome experience.”
The program averages 35 students each year, who spend a month in Switzerland studying art, design and being immersed in foreign cultures, Winward said. They travel throughout the country every day, drawing, writing, going to museums and cathedrals, photographing and more.
“This is not a classroom experience,” Winward said. “It’s getting out in the environment, meeting people, seeing things.”
Students also take part in a project each year in which they pitch their designs to a Swiss organization or company. This year, students created Olympic torch designs for coming Olympic Games in Vancouver and London and submitted them to the International Olympic Museum in Lausanne. Museum staff like the designs so much that they created an exhibit in the museum to display them.
“That’s a very hard venue to get into,” Winward said. “Professionals would love to get in there.”
The designs will now be given to the organizing committees of the Vancouver and London Games for them to consider as they develop designs for the torches.
In previous years, the students have submitted designs to watchmaker Swatch, knife-maker Victorinox and the International Red Cross.
Winward said the program is beneficial to design students because Switzerland has some of the best designers and museums in the world and because students can experience a wealth of different cultures.
“There are three distinct cultures in Switzerland,” he said. “There’s a French culture, a Germanic culture and an Italian culture. Students can travel and become immersed in one of those cultures and be back for dinner that night.”
Experiencing those cultures made for memorable experiences, Winward said, such as watching the local cow fights, in which angry pregnant cows were pitted against each other on a steep hill. The experience also helped him prepare for a career after leaving school, he said.
“It was a matter of getting out and experiencing a whole new place and knowing that when you leave school you’re going to be doing the exact same thing: experiencing a brand new surrounding situation and culture,” he said.
Winward got back from Switzerland Tuesday morning, where he was making arrangements for next year’s trip. Next year students will spend three days living with monks inside St. Bernard Monastery in the Alps. They will spend the time separated from all technology and learning about the monastic lifestyle while doing art, Winward said.
Students will also be participating in a project in which they go in pairs to different parts of the country to photograph with Swiss photojournalists. Their work will then be shown in an exhibit and likely published in a book, Winward said.
The program is hard work, but it’s worth the effort for the experience, Evjen said.
“It was so rigorous,” he said. “You were out early, hitting the streets, drawing in cathedrals all over the country, taking photos all over the place, writing your thoughts about the design of posters that are all around in the streets.”
Students who participate also get a leg up in their careers, Winward said.
“If you have it on your resume that you worked on an international project like this, your resume rises automatically to the top,” he said.
-d.felix@aggiemail.usu.edu