Travel and Semester-Abroad Programs

Partnerships

Berkeley Carroll is the only independent school to offer a college-level engineering/design course through a partnership with NYU/Polytechnic Institute. This course, taught by NYU professors, takes place in their college state-of-the-art labs. The first of many such partnerships, this course provides an amazing opportunity to take a course not usually offered to high school students. Further, the students find the class to be excellent preparation for college.

ONLINE COURSES

Berkeley Carroll is also the only independent school anywhere to offer online courses in partnership with the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University. Our students will join with others from around the world to take courses in Arabic, and Mandarin; what makes Berkeley Carroll's partnership with Johns Hopkins unique is that the language courses are tailored to our students. Students who qualify for these courses receive Berkeley Carroll course credit on their transcripts.

Travel Opportunities

As part of Berkeley Carroll’s commitment to preparing graduates to thrive in an increasingly interconnected world, the school offers opportunities to learn about the complexity and richness of the human experience firsthand.

Berkeley Carroll partners with the World Leadership School to run two programs abroad. Currently, these programs are based in Costa Rica, Chinchotti, India and Shompole, Kenya.

We refrain from calling these travel opportunities “trips” because they are neither sightseeing adventures nor traditional service trips. Led by Berkeley Carroll faculty, students read about and discuss geography, ecology, history, education and the ethics of international development beginning several months before departure. We return each year to the same communities, allowing us to build up relationships over time, and join community members in working on development projects devised by community leaders. In Kenya, students have helped refurbish classrooms and build a dining hall at the local primary school; in India, helped build a community center that will soon include a library. What makes these programs different from traditional service trips is that students work the entire time alongside community volunteers, and learn about the purpose behind each project and how the community selected it. In the evenings and over meals, students learn about local leadership and examine their own leadership styles. These experiences are complemented with homestays and contrasting but relevant visits to other sites within each country, such as a tour of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum and a series of game drives in Kenya’s Masai Mara reserve. Berkeley Carroll students come away from these experiences with a deeper, more textured understanding of a different part of the world, which then gets challenged, reinforced, and multiplied in courses like African History and Modern India.

Students who study Spanish and French have the opportunity to participate in an annual group exchange with our partner schools in Granada and Nice. These programs feature homestays, language immersion, and courses in local history and culture.

Semester Programs

An offshoot of Milton Academy, the Mountain School provides high school juniors the opportunity to live and work on an organic farm in rural Vermont. How are the Berkeley Carroll students who have attended the Mountain School affected by this experience? The academic credits they accrue from their semester in Vermont transfer back to Berkeley Carroll but the friends they make during their four months away are theirs for life. Working and living collaboratively and being responsible for live stock and crops -- these are experiences that most city kids would never be able to have back home in New York City.

The High Mountain Institute Semester isn't for everyone. It's for those who want to combine academics and backpacking, who want to travel through and study in the mountains of central Colorado and the canyons of southeastern Utah, and who want to hone their outdoor skills while sharpening their academic abilities. The gorgeous terrain of the southwest is only a dream for most east coast teenagers -- for those who have attended the High Mountain Institute Semester it's their daily vista.

At the Chewonki Semester School (also known as the Maine Coastal Program) each day integrates academics, work, community, and learning about the natural world. A recognized model for the sustainable management of natural resources, the program emphasizes farming, working with one's hands, recycling, and a commitment to renewable energy. Sustainability is as much a part of the the Chewonki Semester School as are academics.

Located in California's beautiful Napa Valley, the Oxbow School is a one-semester program combining visual arts with academics. Studio time along with visits to museums, galleries, and artist studios are built into a typical Oxbow day, which also emphasizes time management skill building. The Oxbow student becomes thoroughly enmeshed in activities he or she loves. (http://www.oxbowschool.org/home.html).

Traditional academics, supplemented by a hands-on study of marine biology, are the hallmarks of the Island School's program. Located in Cape Eleuthera in the Bahamas, the Island School's program emphasizes classroom work with that done in the ocean, tide pools, and along the beach.