Ava Carson, Victoria Roman and Sarah Abi Saab reported to the island of San Servolo this month as the first Rice University undergraduates to enroll in the Globalization Program at Venice International University, where a week of orientation gave them a first look at the place they will spend the fall.
VIU sits in the Venetian lagoon and draws roughly 120 to 140 students each semester from the 23 universities that make up its consortium. Courses are taught in English by faculty from those institutions and built around themes that are global in reach and grounded in Venice itself.
The students are not the only Rice presence on the island this fall. Luis Campos, the Baker College Associate Professor for History of Science, Technology and Innovation, is teaching two courses in the program: Global Governance for Peace and Security, Cooperation and Development, which sits within the Global Challenges core theme, and The Century of the Gene: The History of Genetics and Eugenics, offered in the Science and Society specialization track.
Orientation week covered a tour of the VIU campus, visits to libraries across the city, an opening ceremony and unstructured hours meant for wandering, which the three students used liberally.
Carson, a junior at Lovett College majoring in political science, said she chose the program before she chose the map. She weighed options in England, Spain, South Korea and Australia and found that the more familiar a place felt, the less it appealed.
“What I knew I wanted was somewhere different enough from the experience I had already had that it was worth spending a semester away from everything I knew,” Carson said.
Italy had never been on her list, she said. She had never visited, knew no one there and had encountered VIU almost by accident, which turned out to be the argument in its favor rather than against it. The tradeoff still took her weeks to work through.
“I love Rice so much, and I’m so connected to my extracurriculars, my friends and my residential college, that it wasn’t a shoo-in decision,” Carson said. “It was something I really had to consider.”
Carson, who is also minoring in cinema and media studies, attended the Venice Film Festival during her first week on the island.
Abi Saab arrived with a longer history of crossing borders. A sophomore at Lovett College double-majoring in political science and global affairs, she spent time in Lebanon before enrolling in college in the United States and has wanted to see a second education system from the inside ever since.
“I hate feeling like I’m stuck in a bubble, and seeing and experiencing things outside the scope of our own lives is so important,” Abi Saab said.
She applied over the summer for VIU’s RED scholarship, which each semester selects a small group of students to build cocurricular programming around a common theme. The work is deliberately disruptive of the habits students bring with them.
“Sometimes it gets cliquey and you want to stick to your school and the people you know,” Abi Saab said. “It’s our job to make sure nobody does that.”
Roman had Venice on a list of her own well before she had an academic reason to be there. A senior at Duncan College majoring in business with a minor in entrepreneurship, she was already ahead in her coursework when the first cohort began forming, and the timing held.
“So much about postgrad is out of sight, unknown, hard to figure out,” said Roman, who is from Houston. “At least I can figure myself out here.”
Carson, for her part, had a clear sense of her own priorities two days in.
“I very practically spent my first two days walking around, watching the regatta and eating gelato, so I’m not unpacked at all,” Carson said, laughing. “I haven’t set foot in a grocery store.”
Classes run through the fall semester. To learn more about VIU, visit the Rice Global website.