The Romeo/Gilbert Intercultural Endowment

I worked on creating social media posts and the CRM system
I learned a lot about a different working culture from my own. It was also interesting to hear about how another country was dealing with the covid 19 pandemic. Attached is an easter post I made.

Before I get into any of the research that I was able to complete, I’d like to give myself a small introduction, but first I want to thank Mr. Paul Gilbert and Mrs. Patricia Romeo-Gilbert for supporting my work on the project. My name is Matthew Lawlor and I’m currently a senior here at St. Lawrence. I am majoring in economics and planning to minor in both Italian and statistics. On campus, I am a member of the Men’s Soccer team. I come from a neighboring state in a small town called Glover, Vermont, though originally, I am from Burlington.

Through taking Dr. Jenny Su’s Cultural Psychology course during the fall semester of my sophomore year, and Dr.

Last Spring semester, I had the privilege of studying abroad in Dunedin, New Zealand. Prior to the start of term, I was able to take some time to travel the North Island and examine Maori music and their culture. As a music major, it is one of my favorite parts of exploring a new country and group of people. I spent seven days traveling around the island visiting Auckland, Waiheke Island, Rotorua, and Lake Taupo. During the semester, I was able to learn more about the culture through a course called Maori Society.

Thanks to Paul Gilbert and Mrs. Patricia Romeo-Gilbert I was awarded a travel enrichment grant in my junior year to pursue my interests in Trinidad and Tobago. I was interested in how Afro-Trinidadians formed and shaped their identity in the wake of the slave trade. I looked primarily at music and theatre and what I found was that those mediums were the primary way Afro-Trinidadians exercised and performed their identity and culture.

In Fall 2016, I had the privilege of traveling down under and spending four wonderful months in Townsville, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, one of the natural wonders of the world, is located closely off of the coast of Townsville in Northern Queensland. Thanks to Paul Gilbert and Mrs. Patricia Romeo-Gilbert I was awarded a travel enrichment grant that allowed me to take advantage of this incredible geographic location.

Growing up I always liked visiting National Parks in Spain with my family. I love spending time outdoors and embracing nature around me. When I learnt that I was accepted to study abroad in Rouen, France I asked myself: how can I combine my passion for the outdoors while being in Rouen? And then I came up with the idea of visiting National Parks in France. I was curious to know what was the difference (if there were any) between National Parks located in the Atlantic Coast of France and those located in the Mediterranean Coast of France. Thanks to the generosity of Mr.

During my trip to Trinidad I used the travel enrichment grant to look at the African influenced religions in the twin island nation. Africans were taken as slaves and brought over to Trinidad. In their struggle to survive and navigate the new space they merged the different spiritual traditions present among the different ethnic groups that were enslaved. Today that mélange of spiritual traditions presents itself in the form of various religious and spiritual practices.

Growing up as an African American of Caribbean descent, it was difficult for me to come to terms with my identity and to acknowledge where I come from because of the limited resources that were available to me. Since I came to St. Lawrence, I began to learn more about my own culture and began to develop my own identity. In my sophomore year, I decided to be a Global Studies major and an art minor because I have always had a passion for art and culture and how it shapes one’s identity.

I began my research in pursuit of the meaning of the word ‘moor’. While growing up, I had come across the word ‘moor’ multiple times in story books, cookie recipes, and even in grocery store isles. During lunch with a Spanish friend at Dana Dining Hall, I mentioned how I was interested in understanding what the term meant and possibly doing further research on it, she asked me to read on the Andalusian region of Spain.

Music is a form of communication that relates to all human beings that it is found all over this planet.  I have become intrigued as to how it intertwines itself with all aspects of life and the places in which it takes hold of the culture.  Finding the people and places that inspire powerful and meaningful music is what makes me thrive as a student of music.

My interests in the relationships that people have with forests spans across many moments on field trips, two semesters abroad in India and in Kenya, and many of my own adventures in upstate New York. I study Global Studies and Environmental Studies with a thematic concentration of the environment in Asia. As my senior year approached I was excited about the prospect of combining all of my experiences into one final project. For my senior year experience, I conducted research on three different forest types around the town of Mcleodganj in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India.

For a week, Alyssa Barrett ’18 and I were able to travel to Florence and Rome with the help of an Enrichment Travel Grant. In Italy, we compared the Mediterranean food and culture with that of the Scandinavian food and culture of Copenhagen, Denmark. Scandinavian Denmark can be characterized by its open-faced rye sandwiches, plentiful pickled herring, and other various meat-based dishes, whereas, Mediterranean Italy is a bounty of vine-ripened tomatoes, aged cheeses, and fresh bread.

During my semester abroad in New Zealand, I was fortunate enough to go hiking and exploring nearly every weekend, which allowed me to interact with the incredible and diverse landscapes of the country.  Throughout these excursions, I was able to conduct a comparative analysis of environmental ethics in terms of recreational hiking areas in the Adirondacks versus New Zealand’s National Parks.  I wrote a series of blog entries on the majority of the hikes I completed, commenting on trail conditions and notable differences (https://swolpiuk.wo

With the vast array of abroad programs made available by SLU and the many wonderful international schools they’ve formed partnerships with, studying abroad is something I knew I wanted to pursue at some point over the course of my four years as a SLU student. The choice wasn’t hard for me; I had been interested in travelling to Japan since I was a child and was able to experience the country secondhand through stories my dad, who often travelled to Tokyo on business, told me, and my interest in taking up a Religious Studies minor led me to take several of the courses taught by Dr.

During my semester abroad in Prague, Czech Republic, I was able to visit sights related to death and how it was treated within a community in Central Europe, more specifically in the cities of Vienna, Austria; Kutná Hora and Prague, Czech Republic. Within these cities I was able to visit places where the culture of death would be prominent and where I would be able to observe funerary practices and how the dead were treated.

My name is Audrey Lane, I am a Senior. Last semester I was fortunate enough to study abroad in Tuscania, Italy. As a creative writing major with a minor in film studies, I am highly interested in storytelling and narratives in different medias. I wanted to use my fall break pursuing that interest and experience new stories presented from different points. I travelled to a small city in Spain to attend the Seminci Valladolid International Film Festival.

My favorite part of spending time in a forest is being surrounded by patterns of green. Tiny star-bursts of moss, curving upright sprays of ferns, thin sweeping lines of grass, bristly erect triangles of spruce. Every plant, tree or moss or fern, shapes and layers its leaves in a different way, so that there is an endless complexity of form and line to marvel at. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved learning to recognize the different patterns unique to each species, memorizing common names and Latin epithets alike.

When I first heard that I was offered the opportunity to study abroad in Spain for my Fall of 2018, I knew I just had to take advantage of the fact that I would be spending a whole semester in Europe: a continent encompassing 7 out of 10 of the Global Fashion Capitals in the World.

As a double-major in Business and Economics, I have not had as much time as I would have liked to work on my craft, but through the grant I was able to do this for a whole semester.

I was fortunate enough to be able to spend the fall semester of my junior year studying at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. As a student majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Computer Science and Statistics, studying Chinese history, culture, and language was completely new and foreign to me. In order to get the most out of my experience in China, I decided to take a closer look at one of the state’s most widely practiced religions: Buddhism.

Through my semester abroad my goal was to discover the different stories Chinese cities have to offer. As a global studies major and Asian studies minor, my research in China focused on challenging the oriental views Western countries make of Asian countries , in this case China. Through my time in Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu, I discovered how multifaceted Chinese cities can be.

I decided early on in my college career that I wanted to study abroad somewhere that would allow me to experience and learn things that I wouldn’t be able to as a tourist. Lucky for me, the spring semester program in Trinidad provided just that. I got to relax on beaches in Tobago, parade in the streets of Port of Spain’s for traditional mas’ and Carnival and dance the night away at Panorama and Soca concerts. Trinidad may be a small island, but it’s a place that has so much soul and even more to offer.

During my semester abroad in Sorrento, Italy during the Spring of 2019, I was fortunate enough to receive a grant to travel to Paris, France for the duration of my spring break. Over the course of four days, I was able to explore Paris and the Louvre museum to discover various works of art that I had learned about through one of my courses at SLU, ultimately allowing me to observe cultural influences on art.

I spent the fall semester of the 2019-2020 school year on the Kenya Semester Program. As an environmental major, I had learned about the effect that deforestation was having in the Mount Kilimanjaro region to both the environment and the people. One of the biggest issues that deforestation causes is a reduction of participation on the mountain, which reduces the snowfall and therefore reduced Glacier. The Glacier run off provides a steady source of water to the surrounding areas, but as they are being reduced so is the water that is coming off the mountain.

This past November, I received a travel grant for my Spring 2019 semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. Commonly known as the “most bicycle friendly city in the world,” Copenhagen served as my reference point to compare other European cities to. During different times throughout the Spring semester, I was able to travel to France, Norway, Northern Denmark, and the Czech Republic to study the cycling habits of people in these countries. I placed an emphasis on the value individuals in each country place on biking as a means of both exercise and transportation.