Fire and Ice

To better prepare students for global citizenry, Grinnell College has begun sending entire courses on international field trips during winter break. Here are snapshots of the first trips, which took place in January 2013.

Courses: 

Namib Desert Ecology, Arid-Zone Conservation and Restoration

Leaders: 

Kathy Jacobson and Peter Jacobson, associate professors of biology

Participants: 

Eight senior biology majors

Destination: 

Gobabeb Training and Research Centre (GTRC), Namib-Naukluft National Park, Namibia, part of the longest conservation area in the world, stretching more than 1,000 miles and spanning six national parks. The photo shows the group atop a dune near the research center. The station’s location at the junction of plains, river, and dunes is home to hundreds of species of plants, insects, and reptiles found nowhere else in the world.

Purposes: 

• To visit research sites studied in the Fall 2012 Namib Desert Ecology course.
• To identify gaps in information that could serve as the subject of National Science Foundation-style graduate research proposals that students developed in the Spring 2013 Arid-Zone Conservation and Restoration course.
• To inform students’ presentations about their experiences and their proposed research in the April 12 biology seminar series.

Three of the eight students stayed on to join the Jacobsons on a two-week research trip to northwestern Namibia. Annie Klodd ’13 and Ian Luby ’13 worked with Kathy Jacobson on a mentored advanced project (MAP) on a fungal pathogen that infects the seeds of the living fossil plant, Welwitschia mirabilis. Robert Logan ’13 worked with Peter Jacobson on a MAP examining the sensitivity of the region’s groundwater springs to climate change.  

Course: 

Korea’s Economic Development. Prerequisites for the trip also included a Korean language class and a general economic development class. 

Leaders:

Jack Mutti, Sidney Meyer professor in international economics; Keith Brouhle ’96, associate professor of economics; Man-Ching Chan, assistant professor of economics; and Grinnell trustee Kihwan Kim ’57, distinguished visiting research professor at the Korean Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management. Kim helped host the group and arranged more than a dozen visits with government ministries, policy agencies, universities, corporations, and cultural organizations. 

Participants: 

Eight students; half were third-year economics majors; the others had various class years and majors.

Destination: 

High-tech and governing Seoul and industrial Pohang and Ulsan, Korea, the epicenters of the “Korean economic miracle” that propelled Korea from poverty to wealth following World War II. 

Purposes:

• To witness firsthand one of the world’s most dramatic economic development case studies and the subject of the academic, economic and policy literature studied in class.
• To hear Koreans at the highest levels of government, academics, and industry articulate their own view of what made the country’s transformation possible.
• To compare academic, political, and economic theory and analysis with on-the-ground reality, and better recognize the role of culture, demography, and geography in influencing this reality.
• To trace the trajectory of Korea’s rapid development as it continues to grow as a high-income country in a particularly dynamic part of the global economy.
• To inform the College’s continuing offerings in economic and global development.