Jamie Corley was nearly booed off the stage last year at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) after she gave her speech as a candidate for student union representative.
“When you run for office at LSE, you also express your personal political views,” says the senior, who is majoring in history and corporate communications and public affairs. “As a conservative, my views were different from 99 percent of the other students. But I reminded them that the spirit of LSE was the discussion of conflicting views.”
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Corley won the election as the representative for international students. When she finished her year at LSE, she was named one of the 20 most influential students among the 8,600-member student body and awarded a life membership to the London School of Economics Student Union.
“I showed up at every meeting and worked very hard,” she says. “I think they respected me because I accepted their ideas, but I didn’t back down from my own views.”
Corley met her goal to become immersed in British culture through the SMU-in-Britain program, in which students who qualify enroll in yearlong courses at prestigious universities in Britain. Corley joined students from throughout the world
in her classes on the Arab-Israeli conflict, foreign policy analysis, human rights and the history of the Enlightenment.
“After studying at some of the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world and competing successfully with their gifted peers, our students resume their SMU educations with an enormously enriched sense of what their futures may hold,” says Jim Hopkins, professor of history and director of SMU-in-Britain. Hopkins, an Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor, teaches British history in the Clements Department of History in SMU’s Dedman College. He attended Cambridge University from 1970-71 as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.
Senior Jamie Corley at Westminster Abbey in London.
More than 400 SMU students have spent a year at universities such as St. Andrews in Scotland, University College London and the University of Kent at Canterbury through SMU-in-Britain since the program began in the early 1970s. According to the London Guardian, 32,000 American students participated in study abroad programs in Great Britain last year. Of those students, only 4,250 were enrolled full time in British universities, according to the British Higher Education Statistics Agency.
“Our goal for SMU-in-Britain was to provide a year-long academic experience that required students to perform at very high standards,” says Ken Shields, professor emeritus of English and director of SMU-in-Britain from 1975 to 2000. “It takes more than four months for a student to adjust to a new culture and understand how a different education system works.”
At the London School of Economics, for example, students’ grades are based on one final exam, says Alan Lin (’08), who studied there in 2006-07 and is now an editor at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a public policy think tank. “A three-hour test determined my grade for the entire year. Exam preparation is intense; there are times when one could not find a study space in the library.”
During her junior year, Jessica Erwin Greenwood (’08) studied history and literature at University College London, where “I read more that year than ever before in my life. Students at British universities have to be much more independent and responsible for their own learning,” says Greenwood, now a Dedman School of Law student.
SMU was one of the first universities to offer study abroad at British universities, Shields says. He relied on his personal network of British friends and colleagues to match SMU students to universities. As a Fulbright Scholar to Great Britain from 1957-59, Shields studied at the University of Edinburgh for two years.
Now SMU-in-Britain is part of the University’s education abroad, which offers 30 study programs in 16 countries. Students first are accepted to SMU-in-Britain, and then apply directly to a British university. They compete with other students from around the world for a limited number of openings.
“Before I went to LSE through SMU-in-Britain, I spoke with others who had participated in the program,” Lin says. “They stressed that this was a year to become more independent, and that when I returned to the United States I would be a different person. It was difficult to fathom what that meant when I
first arrived in London, but now I realize just how true their statements were. This year is one to remember for a lifetime.”
– Nancy Lowell George (’79)