Honoring a study abroad champion
A leader in study abroad, the University of Delaware celebrated its longest-running study abroad partnership this year. Established in 1959, the Danish Institute for Study Abroad (DIS) entered into formal partnership with UD in 1985 to support its semester in Copenhagen. This particular program offers a wide variety of courses, using Europe as a classroom and its most experienced professionals as instructors.
It is the success of that mission that has attracted more than 100 students throughout UD and DIS’s 30 years of partnership for Study Abroad in Copenhagen.
And to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of UD’s longest-running study abroad partnership, DIS established a scholarship in honor of emeritus geography professor Peter Rees, who has coordinated the program since its inception. The first-ever recipients of the scholarship, Alison Smeallie, AS16, and Olivia Cassandro, AS17, began their program in Copenhagen this fall. DIS Director Malene Torp attributes Rees’ dedication to the continued success of the UD-DIS partnership. “It is absolutely essential that there are champions on campus—people who really understand the program and can articulate why it makes sense,” she says. “Peter has been that champion for 30 years.”
Rees sees the program as one that sells itself by the sheer variety of disciplines it offers. “There is no other study abroad program that ranges from the sciences, to the humanities, to the social sciences,” he said.
And yet it has a common thread in the emeritus professor. Maggie McCaughey, AS16, credits Rees for her decision to study abroad in Denmark. “All it took was one meeting with Dr. Rees to convince me that studying abroad for a semester in Copenhagen was for me,” she said. “His enthusiasm was contagious.”
Article by Nikki Laws, AS14
