The value of a domestic exchange semester
Originally published in The Wellesley News, October 15, 2025.
Iris Zhan
When I told people at Wellesley that I would be studying abroad at Wesleyan, they laughed. Studying abroad implies leaving the country to study at an institution with an entirely different culture. People thought it was silly to say I was studying abroad if I was just going to Connecticut. Others didn’t understand the unique value of the advocacy and community-based training semester (ACTS) for human rights that I was doing until I mentioned that we get to “actually go abroad” after the semester is over to do field work in another country.
