Students in "From the Rockies to the Andes," a 300-level honors course worth eight credit hours, spent spring break studying in Argentina, where they compared the country's geography and diverse culture to New Mexico's.
The course meets once a week and is cross-listed in behavioral science and earth and planetary sciences. The class focuses on similarities between the arid regions of Argentina and New Mexico.
Before traveling overseas, the class visited several sites in New Mexico, studying how the Rio Grande was formed and the history of the American Indians who settled there.
The course also focuses on how Spanish occupation changed and shaped the land and the cultures that were already in the area.
"One of the most culturally interesting places we visited was a neighborhood by the name of La Boca, in Buenos Aires, where a lot of immigrants usually go," said UNM senior Tara Monroe, who participated in the program. "They painted the area with all kinds of radical colors, because they had to use all of their leftover boat paint to paint all of the buildings and didn't really have enough to paint any house a single color. It was like a huge patchwork quilt."
Student Cait Rottler was unsure what she wanted to do with her degree until she took the class and went on the trip to Argentina.
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"I knew that I wanted to do something with ecology, but all I could really think of doing was teach it," she said. "Now I'm thinking that I can do something like teach it at a college level and do research or go into research for a little while and then teach. But either way, I think the most important thing that I learned from the trip was that I can do field research and I could work with something that interests me."
While the students had to go to class over spring break, the experiences they had outweighed the sacrifices they had to make, Rottler said.
"I would definitely recommend this trip to other students who are thinking about going," she said. "It's a lot of work, but it's also a lot of fun and . the work you do is not too intense, and you don't just go on the trip to work because you are there to learn and experience the culture, and part of experiencing the culture is getting out on your own and just watching and talking to the people in that culture."
