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The dZi Foundation implements, supports, and funds projects to improve the basic quality of the lives of children, women, and men in mountain communities with a focus on education, health, culture, and welfare. Global LAB and The dZi Foundation collaborate on village-based community service programs in the Himalayas.

Global Diversity Foundation promotes cultural and biological diversity and conservation in communities around the world. Global LAB and Global Diversity Foundation collaborate in Morocco on community service projects focusing on indigenous Berber communities in the High Atlas Mountains.

The High Atlas Foundation establishes community-based projects in Morocco that local people design and manage, and that are in partnership with government and non-government agencies. HAF was created by Peace Corps Volunteers and staff who served in Morocco. Global LAB and The High Atlas Foundation collaborate on Berber village-based community service programs in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco.

The Rubin Museum of Art is New York's newest museum and the first museum in the Western World dedicated to the art of the Himalayas and surrounding regions. Global LAB and the Rubin Museum of Art collaborate on multiple education initiatives in the US and throughout the Himalaya.

Subul Assalam Centre for the Arabic Language (SACAL-Fez) is an Arabic language center located in the historic city of Fez, Morocco. In addition to offering instruction in the Moroccan Dialect and Modern Standard Arabic, SACAL-Fez provides cultural lectures, activities (e.g. calligraphy, henna, oud lessons), and home-stays in the inimitable Fez medina (old city). Global LAB and SACAL-Fez collaborate closely on all these experiences with the ultimate goal of delivering a better understanding of Islam and Moroccan culture.

The School for International Training prepares students to be interculturally effective leaders, professionals, and citizens. In so doing, SIT fosters a worldwide network of individuals and organizations committed to responsible global citizenship. Global LAB works closely with SIT professors and graduate students to assist with curricula development, risk management, diversity issues, and program design and delivery.

Carla Bossard, Ph.D. Carla Bossard is a Professor of Biology at Saint Mary's College of California (SMC) and an avid believer in and practitioner of international education. She has designed and led 18 travel/study courses for university level students, 3 for high school students and 2 for high school teachers, primarily in Asia and the South Pacific. At SMC she teaches environmental biology courses and does research on control of invasive plant species. She is a founding member and long-term leader of the California Invasive Plant Council and lead editor and author of the book, Invasive Plants of California's Wildlands.

Claire Burkert has lived and worked in Asia since 1989 when she created a major income-generation project for women artists and artisans in southern Nepal; the Janakpur Women's Development Center continues to prosper 13 years later. In Tibet, Claire has consulted for The Tibet Heritage Fund, designing strategies to organize and support traditional craft production and initiating pilot, village-based carpet weaving projects. Since 1994, Claire has primarily focused her work in Vietnam, where she has collaborated with Oxfam Quebec, Oxfam Hong Kong, and Oxfam Belgique to support numerous groups of ethnic minority women craft producers. With support from the Ford Foundation, she has worked extensively with Hanoi's Museum of Ethnology and CraftLink to develop innovative training and income-generation programs to help revitalize Vietnam's indigenous artisans. Claire is currently working with a JICA funded consulting firm advising Vietnam's national policymakers on the creation of the Handicraft Masterplan for Vietnam.

Hal Denton, serves as Global LAB's Outside General Counsel through his law firm, Denton Tavares Paes LLC. He provides a wide range of general legal and corporate advice with a particular focus on risk management and safety policies and protocols, corporate governance, and monitoring outside counsel. He served as General Counsel for AFS Intercultural Programs from 1989 until 2004. AFS is a large multi-national not-for-profit organization with approximately 11,000 study abroad students per year in 54 countries.

Paula Green, Ed.D., founded and directs the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding and serves on the faculty of the School for International Training, where she developed SIT's programs in conflict transformation across cultures. She has extensive international experience in peacebuilding and has taught at several graduate schools, universities, and other educational centers worldwide. As a facilitator in interethnic dialogue and conflict transformation, Green has worked in Bosnia, Israel and Palestine, Rwanda and Eastern Africa, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, and many other regions. In addition to consulting and training, Green has been an active board member of several international peace organizations, including the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. The author of numerous internationally published articles and chapters, Green co-edited the textbook, Psychology and Social Responsibility: Facing Global Challenges.

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens started Outer Voices in 2003 as a response to her experiences working as an activist in the U.S. She is a writer and organizer with nearly two decades’ experience in non-profit work, specializing in women’s health, environmental, and sustainability issues. The founder of Women’s Health Education Project in New York City, she has also served as a consultant to various other non-profit organizations. Her writing and editorial work include publication in the Village Voice, Downtown, and Whole Earth. In book publishing, she was developmental editor for Opened the Gates Laughing by Mayumi Oda (Chronicle, 2001).

Jamie Zeigler Laurens is an independent school teacher based at Westridge School in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in English and French from Carnegie Mellon University. In her seven years as a teacher she has sought to instill the values of global citizenship, self-awareness and environmental stewardship in her students, and has led student service learning projects focusing on environmental sustainability and cultural immersion in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Artic, India, and the Galapagos. Jamie has traveled to twenty-five countries and studied the literature and movement of several cultures. She is a published author and fluent in French and Spanish. She currently teaches Yoga and Creative Writing to students in grades 7 through 12, is a student of Buddhism and Vedanta, and practices Thai massage.

Bob Lesser is Associate Director for Strategic Planning and External Relations in the New York City Department of Education’s Office of New Schools. Bob’s work focuses on strategic planning and partnership development for the DOE’s small schools initiative. Bob is also the founder and co-director of World Change Travel, an educational travel company focusing on leadership training and sustainable development. Bob holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University and a BA in sociology from Vassar College.

Gary J. Martin, Ph.D. is the Director of The Global Diversity Foundation and is responsible for establishing long-term ‘observatories’ of cultural and natural diversity at selected field sites in Asia, Africa and Latin America.He has been involved in conservation and ethnobotanical work for over twenty-five years, starting with a gap year in 1980 in which he carried out fieldwork in Mexico. He holds a BS in botany from Michigan State University and a MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Gary also serves as a Director of Diversity Excursions Ltd., a subsidiary of The Global Diversity Foundation, which is dedicated to providing ecologically appropriate and scientifically informative travel to southern Morocco.

Chi Nguyen is currently a sophomore at Stanford University studying environmental engineering. Chi is heavily involved with Stanford's Green Dorm Project, traveling with other student researchers to Washington, D.C. to win the EPA's P3 grant to support further research. In 1998, Chi and her sister started Viet Nam Youth Projects, a series of benefit concerts and fundraisers to raise money for needy children and communities in Viet Nam. Since then, she has organized and performed in seven annual concerts and has raised nearly $70,000 to fully fund the street children shelter in the city of Can Tho, a school-building project in Ca Mau, and scholarships for college students. Her experiences in Viet Nam have led to her activism for education on behalf of children who otherwise cannot afford it. Chi is currently featured in a Target television ad with Tiger Woods to promote community service.

Craig Selzman, MD is Assistant Professor of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He has extensive international experience, including medical relief work in sub-saharan Africa and wilderness expeditions in South America. He is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School, an avid kayaker and mountain climber, and an expert in wilderness medicine. He received his BA from Amherst College and his MD from the Baylor School of Medicine.

C. David Thomas is the founding director of the Indochina Arts Partnership, a non-profit organization he launched in 1988 to foster cultural development and exchange. To date, the IAP has facilitated more than 50 residencies in the U.S. for visiting Vietnamese artists and writers. David first arrived in Vietnam in 1969 as a combat artist/soldier. Stationed in Pleiku with the 20th Engineer Battalion, David's jobs ranged from drafting blueprints, to driving a jeep, to sketching engineering projects. He first returned to Vietnam in 1987 with the U.S. Indochina Reconciliation Project; since then he has made dozens of trips coordinating cultural exchange programs between the US and Vietnam. David was awarded a 2002-03 Fullbright Scholar grant to live in Vietnam. His book, Ho Chi Minh: A Portrait was published in 2003.

Gray Tuttle is the Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Inner Asian Studies at Harvard University in 2002. He studies the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing empire. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is central to all his research. His current research project focuses on the support that Tibetan Buddhist institutions have received from the governments of China from the 17th to 20th century and how this support, along with economic growth in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, has fueled expansion and renewal of these institutions into the contemporary period.

Kate Wang, MSc currently manages the Wildlife Conservation Society's Pacific Coast programs in the United States. Focal areas of her work include strategic partnership development, outreach, fundraising and the development of a capacity building and education project for Native American youth. Prior to joining WCS, Kate was the Outreach Program Director at the North American Association for Environmental Education. Kate has experience leading international and domestic wilderness trips and cultural study tours for youth and is passionate about leadership development, environmental sustainability and the value of cultural exchange both within the United States and abroad. Kate holds a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University and an M.S. in Environmental Education and Behavior, with a concentration on Ecotourism, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Brad Choyt
Although he wanted to travel to India while a student at Phillips Exeter, Brad didn't have the chance to start exploring Asia until his junior year abroad from Brown University, when he first visited India and Nepal. Once he graduated with degrees in Studio Art, Religious Studies, and Art History, he returned to Kathmandu where he served as an apprentice to a master Tibetan thang-ka painter who is still, 20 years later, a close friend. After two years of trying to learn the intricacies of grinding stone pigments and using brushes made with single hairs, he returned to the United States ready for graduate school and the making of an entirely different kind of art. Over the next three years, he earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on painting and sculpture. Knowing that he wanted to inspire young artists, he became a faculty member at Miss Porter's School in Farmington, CT, and served there for five years. During that time, he continued to create and exhibit his work, but he also expanded his sense of what was possible in a classroom and even what constituted the limits of a classroom. In 1995, he began taking students to Asia, primarily in the Indian and Nepali Himalaya, experiences that led him directly to the work he does today at Global Learning Across Borders. This work has brought him and what is now a wide range of collaborators and fellow educators back to the region dozens of times and given him deep experience in everything from the philosophy to the logistics of planning international curricula that emphasize profound personal transformation and safety. While designing these programs during the summer and the academic year, Brad served, from 2001 to 2005, as a faculty member and Chaplain of Eastern Religions at St. Paul's School in Concord, NH. From 2005-2007 he served as the first Director of Education at the Rubin Museum of Art, the country's only museum devoted exclusively to Himalayan art and culture. Currently, Brad is the Director of Green School in Bali, Indonesia, a school slated to open its doors in the fall of 2008. He and his wife, a writer, and their two young children, live outside of Ubud, Bali's cultural center.

Deborah Friedman
Deborah received her Master's degree in Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management with a concentration in International Education from School for International Training (SIT). Her thesis, The American Gap Year, examined the Gap Year trend in America from college admissions advisors' perspectives and has presented her research at the Federation EIL Poland General Assembly and, as a guest lecturer, at SIT. Currently, Deborah manages UNICEF's P²D (personal x professional development) program, a non-traditional career development program for UNICEF staff members and their families. Prior to UNICEF, Deborah designed, developed, and lead intercultural programs, both domestically and abroad, with organizations such as The Experiment in International Living, Semester at Sea, and Kids Can Free the Children / Leaders Today, The Institute for Civic Leadership at the Dwight School, and CIEE. From 2004-2005, Deborah served on the Board of World Learning as a Student Trustee and is now a Leader of their New York Alumni Chapter. Deborah has her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Communication Arts with a minor in Business and attended Boston University's Study Abroad Internship Program in Sydney, Australia.

John Eastman
John brings more than 20 years of non-profit experience to Global LAB, including extensive international experience, having spent five years in Asia working for NGO's before dedicating himself to non-profit global education initiatives based in the United States. His intercultural education background includes design and development of global studies and service programs in Cambodia, China, India, Laos, Morocco, and Vietnam; ESL instruction in Hanoi for the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society; and teaching at Houston's Taiwanese-American Community Association and Park Place School, serving Vietnamese and Mexican children of recent immigrants. In the early 1990's John was an editor at Oxford University Press in New York City and later helped design and manage PEN America Center's national literacy program for at-risk populations. He is a graduate of Amherst College.

Kathleen Frye
Kathleen has been making and teaching art for 25 years. For the last three years she has taught at The Dwight School in Manhattan, and was recently appointed head of the school-wide curriculum review committee. She will also direct the school’s museum program, which integrates museum learning experiences with classroom curriculum. Kathleen’s teaching practice focuses on the arts as a means of appreciating the rich diversity of both local and world communities. Before moving to the east coast in 1998, Kathleen lived in Colorado for eighteen years where she worked as a visiting artist in inner city schools, as adjunct faculty at the college level, and founded a successful after-school visual arts program for children. Kathleen spent a year in Brazil as an exchange student and returned later for extensive travel through South America. She is a graduate of the University of California with an MFA in Printmaking from Colorado State University and an MA in Art Education from City College of New York.

Scott Hoyt
Scott earned his MBA from New York University and has over twenty-five years experience in marketing and business development. While working over the years in sales, advertising, marketing, overseas new products, and business development (most notably in the areas of OTC family planning products and herbal remedies), he served as a member of the Board of Directors at Carter-Wallace Inc., a Fortune 500 healthcare products company. Scott has served on the board of the Lower East Side Service Center (L.E.S.C) in New York City and for nearly two decades, he has been a supporter of The Tibetan Classics Translators Guild, where he currently serves as President. In recent years, Scott established Hoyt Tea, a new venture in beverage tea, as well as Tea Dragon Films. In 2007 he directed and produced the feature length documentary film, The Meaning of Tea. Scott continues to travel widely, and maintains a keen interest in studying and photographing cultures and traditions around the world where tea is understood, and appreciated.

Lauren M. Maher
Lauren has over12 years experience in international development project management with a primary focus on Africa and health. She currently serves as Senior Program Officer for the Firelight Foundation, where she is responsible for supporting projects involving sub-Saharan African families affected by HIV/AIDS. Prior to joining Firelight, she worked at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1998-2006, supporting grantees in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, coordinating The Philanthropy Workshop, and serving as a member of the Women and Development Strategic Working Group as well as the Foundation's corporate citizenship grantmaking committee. From 2003-2004, she was a Coro Leadership New York Fellow. Lauren is currently pursuing a Masters of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she is focusing on international health.

Julia Travers
Julia is the director of CITYterm, a semester program for high school juniors and seniors that develops independent learning and thinking through intensive, interdisciplinary, experience-based learning. Julia brings to CITYterm a diverse background in teaching, international non-profit management and corporate strategy. She began her teaching career in the English Department at Deerfield Academy where she taught American and British Literature. Life in a historic village proved a catalyst for life in the modern city, propelling her to Hong Kong where she taught in the English Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and later ran the Hong Kong Office for the Yale-China Association. She returned to the US to earn her MBA at Yale University, and afterwards joined the Strategy and Change Internal Practice at IBM. Julia is addicted to travel, language acquisition, cuisine and hiking.

John Eastman, Executive Director
John brings more than 20 years of non-profit experience to Global LAB, including extensive international experience, having spent five years in Asia working for NGO's before dedicating himself to non-profit global education initiatives based in the United States. His intercultural education background includes design and development of global studies and service programs in Cambodia, China, India, Laos, Morocco, and Vietnam; ESL instruction in Hanoi for the Vietnam-USA Friendship Society; and teaching at Houston's Taiwanese-American Community Association and Park Place School, serving Vietnamese and Mexican children of recent immigrants. In the early 1990's John was an editor at Oxford University Press in New York City and later helped design and manage PEN America Center's national literacy program for at-risk populations. He is a graduate of Amherst College.

Coby Hadas, Community Relations Director
Coby criss-crosses the US in order to spread the word about gap year and other international education opportunities for young adults. He speaks with first hand experience, as he traveled extensively before, during, and after obtaining a B.A. in International Relations from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Upon graduation he decided that his classroom education was sorely lacking in experiential knowledge. Thus, he left the comforts of modernity in order to learn firsthand about indigenous communities in Colombia and Peru. For two years he continued his studies of Spanish while volunteering in a variety of grassroots projects in the upper reaches of the Amazon. He has traveled and worked extensively throughout Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and India. During his world travels, Coby realized the importance of cross-cultural, immersion-based education, and now strives to share the magical world in which we live with others. Coby’s other passions include yoga, jogging, meditation, and cycling.

Alex Safos, Director of Middle East and North Africa Programs
Alex brings to Global LAB 15 years of domestic and international experience as a management consultant with BearingPoint and Chemonics international. He has lived and worked in several overseas locales, including Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine. Alex was a business development manager with Chemonics International, specializing in international development funded by USAID and The World Bank. In its Middle East and North Africa division, he managed major projects for sustainable tourism and cultural heritage preservation in Jordan, fisheries management in Oman, and civil society promotion in Egypt. He was also the US-based manager for Chemonics’ offices in Cairo, Egypt and Palestine. Alex’s seminal overseas experience occurred in Fes, Morocco where he lived for a year and taught beginning and advanced English classes at the American Language Center (ALC). In addition, he assisted with the roll-out of the Arabic Language Institute/Fes, now the leading Arabic instruction center in Morocco. Alex holds a M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies—where he achieved proficiency in Modern Standard Arabic—and a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin’s Plan II Liberal Arts Program.

International Staff

Kempie Blythe, Program Leader
Kempie leads Global LAB programs in Morocco and India. A native of Charlotte, NC, Kempie graduated from Colorado College where she majored in religion with a comparative concentration in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. In her high school years she began traveling in Asia, seeking perspectives drastically different from her own. Kempie’s initial intrigue with traveling developed into a passion for global learning and experiential education. She has lived, studied, taught, and volunteered in Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. One of her most memorable experiences was the semester she spent in Morocco with The School for International Training (SIT). There she pursued intensive Arabic study and conducted an independent project on Gnawa identity. While in Morocco, she fell in love with the unique play of cultures and influences. During college, she also studied abroad in India, New Zealand, and Mexico where she examined the struggles of several indigenous communities. This interest has sparked her current intrigue with indigenous desert cultures. Furthermore, Kempie has been involved in the field of education for the past five years. Most recently this passion led her to Indonesia where she completed a 10-month Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in East Java. She has also taught ESL in the States and served as a teacher’s aide at an environmental education school in Colorado. Kempie currently resides in San Francisco, CA where she works at a nonprofit that places at-risk youth in employment in local arts organizations. She is also an active volunteer at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) where she aids newly arrived refugees in their resettlement. An avid photographer, yogi, jewelry-maker, and outdoorswoman, Kempie loves creative endeavors and the fresh air. When she has the time, she is likely to be found cooking harira, a delectable Moroccan soup, for her friends.

Jackie Dennis, Program Leader
As the Program Director for the India Semester, Jackie brings more than ten years of international travel experience to Global LAB. Jackie's incendiary preoccupation with Modern Tibetan Studies was fueled while a student on the University of Wisconsin College Year in Nepal Program '99-00. During this time, she traveled independently throughout India, Tibet and Thailand, acquiring a taste for adventure that has yet to be sated. She has since made seven extended return visits to this region, both as a graduate student and as three-time field instructor for study abroad organizations. As a field instructor, Jackie designed and taught several comprehensive Tibetan Studies curricula - focusing on Art History, Religion, Current Events and Political History. In 2007, Jackie received her MA from Naropa University in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies. Trained as an oral and textual Tibetan-English interpreter, Jackie now teaches Tibetan language, culture and religion to her students on rooftops and mountaintops throughout the pan-Himalayan region. She has spent the better part of the last decade traveling, working and studying in South Asia, North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and South America. In her free time, Jackie studies Sanskrit and Hebrew; translates Tibetan poetry for publication; writes travel narratives; dreams of her next adventure and the mountain hermitages of Tibet. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kai Johnson, Program Leader
Kai currently leads India semester programs for Global LAB. He holds a B.A. in Human Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has spent the last several years in transit from the US to South Asia and the Pacific for study, work, and travel. During his time at UW-Madison, Kai spent two semesters abroad—the first in Suva, Fiji, and the second in Hyderabad, India. While in Hyderabad Kai studied Hindi, Urdu and Nyaya and Vedanta Philosophy and afterwards spent three months in an internship with the Micro Insurance Academy in Delhi. These experiences imbued him with a passion for the challenges and rewards inherent in international and experiential education, as well as a love for the intensity and the diversity of life in India, which he hopes to communicate to students. In addition to leading with Global LAB, Kai has also criss-crossed the US as a leader with Trek America and was a founding member of an organization aimed at increasing the availability of literary resources in Fiji.

Tracy Joosten, Program Leader
Tracy leads India Semester Programs for Global LAB. She has recently completed her M.A. in Conflict Transformation from the School for International Training (SIT) in Brattleboro, Vermont. Her thesis explores how public schools in the United States teach conflict mediation and social competency skills to their students. A program facilitator for SIT's Youth Programs, Tracy works with youth from Vermont, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, and the United Kingdom teaching workshops on social networking, prison industrial complex, restorative justice, and nonviolent communication. She also facilitates dialogues on gender, social identity, and spirituality. Tracy lived in Ladakh in 2006 while teaching for the Vermont Intercultural Semester. She created and implemented courses in Ladakhi Language, cross-cultural communication, and co-wrote and taught curriculum for a high school honors level research methods course. Her passion for Himalayan cultures stems from her studies in Nepal with SIT's Culture and Development program in 2001. Resulting from her SIT education, Tracy's teaching style strives to meld independent study and academic inquiry with personal transformation. Fascinated with communication, Tracy enjoys focusing on language learning, ritual, and music as a means to create connection across cultural divides.

Galen Murton, Program Leader
Galen has designed and directed cross-cultural educational programs in South and Central Asia for Global LAB and other organizations since 2005. He first visited South Asia as a student on the University of Wisconsin-College Year in Nepal program in 1998-99, and following graduation from Middlebury College (with a degree in comparative religion) spent five subsequent years trekking, climbing, and studying in remote areas of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Pakistan, particularly in the Himalayan and Karakoram region. His tireless enthusiasm for exploration, and genuine appreciation for peoples of all cultures and walks of life, has been a subtle invitation for many to put aside more mundane concerns and lead a similarly exhilarating nomadic lifestyle. Galen has high altitude technical climbing experience in mountain ranges throughout North and South America, and is an instructor with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School/Outward Bound USA on the Atlantic coast near his home in Portland, Maine. He is a certified Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician (WEMT), and in addition to working as an educator in South and Central Asia, Galen has worked for the UNHCR with Afghan refugees in Islamabad and aided research projects on the sacred geography of the Kathmandu Valley. A student and observer of diverse religious traditions, Galen continues to spend several months of every year in the Himalaya and strives to inspire in others the deep sensitivity to cultural and religious nuance that is gained through responsible, immersive travel across the Subcontinent.

Erin Popek, Program Leader
Erin is currently an MA candidate in International Education at the School for International Training. Her first visit to South Asia and the Himalaya began in the spring of 2000 through Gonzaga University, her undergraduate institution, where she focused on International Studies and Political Science. With P.I.E.R (Program for International Education and Relief), Erin spent the summer teaching—and being taught-in an orphanage in Delhi, afterwards gravitating toward the mountains. There, while continuing her own pilgrimage, she researched for her undergraduate thesis, The Future of Chinese Tibet, through the eyes of Tibetan refugees. While listening to HH the Dalai Lama speak during a Kalachakra Initiation ceremony on the Tibetan-Indian border, Erin encountered a group of US high school students and their leaders who were also fortunate enough to be present for this holy occasion. Fascinated with this form of education she determined to become involved. The past five years have been a winding path of leading experientially-based international education programs, exploring the world's mountainous and wild places, including her own backyard in Alaska, white-water river guiding, teaching Spanish and being a student herself. She is a NOLS Alaska Mountaineering graduate and recently finished a Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician course in the White Mountains of New England. Erin’s wanderlust spirit, nomadic life-style and true love for putting herself outside of her comfort-zone can be contagious.

Periodically, Global LAB will feature alumni from prior programs whose cross-cultural experiences helped to shape their future paths, commitments, and interests. Check back for these personal insights, updates, and inspirational stories from these exceptional individuals. If you are a Global LAB alum and would like to share your story for a future spotlight, please answer the two questions below, submit a recent photo and email us at info@global-lab.org. Short videos/digital stories are welcome too!

Alumni Spotlight #1

Katie Finnigan, Global LAB Alumna from our Spring 2006 India Semester Program

1) What was the most valuable thing you learned from living/traveling in India?

I learned that many things that I had thought were natural, innate traits were in fact cultural. For example, in the United States the idea of increasing efficiency is almost always good. Even in the non-profit world, organizations are always trying to streamline their processes and boost production. In India, many things are not efficient at all (try finding a working ATM or a train that's running on time). I found this to be among the most frustrating and most rewarding things about my trip. In India, it may have taken me 4 hours to mail a package, but while I was trying to get it done, chances are I'd have a crazy adventure or meet an extraordinary, interesting person who would invite me back to their house for tea. It is convenient to have things like shopping or shipping so streamlined in the United States, but I had no idea how much spontaneity and human connection we lose along the way until I went to India.

2) In what, if any, ways is your international experience influencing what you are doing now?

I had wanted to work in non-profits before I went to India, but my trip solidified that goal. When I came back, I started canvassing door-to-door for an environmental campaign and started a club on my college's campus to raise awareness about poverty in my college's town. Going to India also gave me a desire to work internationally. I've
graduated college now and I'm currently preparing to go back to grad school in global communication and development.