Established in 2012, this fund supports student and faculty travel to Asia.
In the spring of 2016 I took a leave of absence from St. Lawrence. I spent this time traveling through South America and working on a few farms. This excursion put me one semester behind my peers at St. Lawrence and while I was lucky enough to walk with my friends and classmates last May, I was also preparing for quite the adventure.
For my Final semester of St. Lawrence, I had originally planed on studying abroad in India. That program was unfortunately cancelled, and I had a wonderful time in Thailand (my new country of study). But thanks to the Freeman Foundation Asian Endowment, I was able to visit India during my October break, and see some of the places I would have travelled in had the India semester ran.
This past April, Elsa Coughlin ‘19 and I received a travel grant for our Spring 2018 semester abroad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. With two weeks of break allotted to us in April, we were able to go to Northern India, completing a trek in the Western Himalayas, experiencing the city of Delhi, and engaging in person with content previously studied in Dr. Basu’s “Icons of Islamic Architecture” course.
I traveled to Japan in February of 2020, en route to a semester in New Zealand, with the intention of studying Zen Buddhism and local philosophical traditions in practice, and how these traditions affect daily life for their practitioners and their surrounding culture. I spent 2 days in Nagano, where I visited the Zenkoji Temple, a major Buddhist temple, and attended a sunrise mass. Before mass, a local woman noticed my uncertainty and approached me, helpfully explaining some of the traditions of the temple and asking questions about where I’d travelled from.
