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When students step inside our doors, they discover that learning at SMU means going beyond our Dallas campus. Almost 30 percent of SMU students study abroad for a year, a summer, or a semester. And many others spend their summer adventures as volunteers or interns. Read the stories below to get a glimpse of SMU students making an impact around the world.

Parkland Collegiate Fellows, Dallas, Texas
There’s a big difference between a diagram in a biology textbook and a living, breathing patient. So SMU students like Huong Truong (shown right), Rajiv Parmar, and Saiqa Khan become Parkland Collegiate Fellows each summer for nine weeks. Fellows might find themselves removing IVs, taking patients’ vital signs, or shadowing doctors during surgery. The opportunity to work at the largest hospital in the Southwest gives these aspiring physicians invaluable experience.
Read Rajiv’s journal
Read Saiqa’s journal


SMU Archaeological Field School, Taos, New Mexico
Centimeter by centimeter, with each stroke of tiny trowels against the New Mexico soil, SMU students and faculty go back in time. Students like Emily George (shown right), who participated in this summer’s Archaeological Field School near SMU’s Taos campus, uncovered pottery, tools, and other artifacts that shed light on what life was like 3,000 years ago for the Pueblo Indians of the Archaic period.
Read Emily’s journal

Brevard Music Center, Brevard, North Carolina
The curtain rises. The spotlight shines down. The concert begins. It’s the beginning of an evening out for an audience of 1,800 people at the Brevard Summer Music Festival, but just another day at work for SMU theatre major Lee Helms. The festival brings the country’s best young musicians together with top faculty and touring artists like Emmylou Harris and Ricky Skaggs. As stage crew chief, Lee and his crew of five manage the hundreds of details required to present this summer’s 80-plus concerts.
Read Lee’s journal


Geology Field Camp, Fairbanks, Alaska
Students at Geology Field Camp get all the basic tools for mapping the remote Alaskan wilderness: a field book, maps, good hiking boots. Oh, and bear spray to keep the massive grizzlies away. This summer, SMU senior Robert Talamantez encountered his share of bears and caribou, but he also had an even more amazing encounter — the first dinosaur footprint ever discovered in the Denali Range of Alaska. The find is the first evidence that dinosaurs roamed that area 70 million years ago.
Read Robert’s journal


Uganda
Spending the summer teaching students ranging from second to seventh grades is a big enough challenge, but that’s only part of the adventure when the classroom is located on the African savannah. Along with learning the survival skills needed to teach, junior Emily Loeb is discovering what it takes to live among zebras, elephants, and lions. Emily’s volunteer work left her convinced that children need the critical thinking that music, dance, and drama education can encourage — particularly in a place like Uganda, where survival is on the line every day.
Read Emily’s journal


STOP, Delhi, India
Each year, hundreds of thousands of women and children around the world are forced into prostitution or other forms of slavery. In India, this trafficking is creating an HIV/AIDS crisis. SMU student Lydia Butts traveled to the area around Delhi to work with the nonprofit organization STOP (Stop Trafficking and Oppression of Children and Women) and re-educate young women who have been rescued from lives of prostitution. Lydia used the Hindi she learned while at SMU to present desperately needed HIV/AIDS education programs around the country.
Read Lydia’s journal

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