In the past 50 years, more than 1,500 ESF landscape architecture students have studied in more than 200 locations around the globe through ESF’s pioneering Off-Campus Program (OCP).

The program was founded in 1970 by the late George F. Earle, a professor in the landscape architecture department who believed students would benefit from a broader educational experience.

“Our students — the future designers of the landscape — needed, I felt, the seeing and feeling of a kind of landscape and cultural ‘contrapposto,’ ” (an Italian sculptural term for “asymmetrically balanced opposites”), Earle wrote in The Global Classroom, a departmental publication about the program.

ESF’s program started like study-abroad programs at other colleges, with faculty members accompanying an entire class to a country where they would spend the semester taking classes and exploring the country as a group.

In the first years of the program Distinguished Teaching Professor George Curry and Earle took the first group to Antigua, Guatemala, followed by Earle and faculty member Claude Freeman ’59 taking students to Merida, Venezuela.

However, Curry said that model wasn’t sustainable at ESF with its relatively small landscape architecture faculty and studio-based instruction, so he and his colleagues changed the format. They devised a unique program that encourages students to study independently projects they themselves have developed in a location that they select. Each group is assigned a faculty advisor and the faculty arranges for an on-site consultant.

“The structure of the program is distinct from any other study-abroad model by emphasizing a high degree of experiential and self-directed learning,” wrote Matt Potteiger, professor and OCP coordinator, in an email. “Students go off-campus not as an entire class but in small groups of four to seven so they can become part of the place, participating in daily life.”

“The idea of the program was essentially that the student was thrust into an environment that they were unfamiliar with,” said Richard Hawks ’72, Distinguished Service Professor and a student in the first OCP semester in Guatemala. “It was like jumping in the deep end of the pool, a total immersion in an unfamiliar culture and landscape.”

“The whole time they are immersed in a different culture,” Potteiger said. “While new  places can be exciting they can also be challenging. Through this experience of difference, students can begin to understand and adjust to these differences, which is critical for their future role as professionals and designing for a diversity of people and places.”

“As the coordinator of this program for over 25 years I’ve seen students go beyond their comfort zones and gain greater self-direction and confidence that comes with doing a rigorous study of their own design.”

Matthew Potteiger

That immersive experience is something Keenan Porter, ’20 LA, looked forward to from the moment he toured ESF as a high school student.

“The program was a core reason I decided to go to ESF,” he wrote in an email. “The program is completely different from any other study-abroad program, with a high degree of freedom to choose where you live and what you study. You are completely immersed in a new place, deciding for yourself how to spend each day in order to complete your research but also to have a fun and fulfilling experience.”

Porter traveled to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, where his study semester was located. He not only benefited academically, but also embraced the opportunity to travel to other cities and countries. He visited 30 Dutch cities during his time in the Netherlands, as well as cities in Belgium, Germany and Denmark. “This exposed me to countless new cultures, ideas and design approaches that have changed how I view space and design landscapes,” he explained.

Prior to the Off-Campus Program semester, students work one-on-one with their faculty advisor to develop their study proposals. “The Off-Campus Program serves as an undergraduate thesis or capstone project for our undergraduate students, giving them experience with project definition, methodology, field work and documentation, all of which contribute to their self confidence and attractiveness to employers,” remarked Dr. Doug Johnston ’80, professor and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture who participated in the Off-Campus Program by studying in Northern Scotland in 1979.

“Graduates of the program have much higher rates of employment and higher starting salaries than the national average, which we in part attribute to the Off-Campus Program,” Johnston said. Alumna Kate Chesebrough ’16 found inspiration for her semester abroad in the 2010 documentary “Waste Land” that chronicles artist Vik Muniz’s work with catadores, or waste pickers of recyclable material, at a landfill outside Rio de Janeiro. The trash was transformed into art that ultimately sold at auction houses in London.

“I was struck with the idea that creative thinking and engaged interactions transform how we see material and each other. … I had to be there,” she wrote in an email. After sending her portfolio to Muniz’s studio in Rio de Janeiro multiple times, she wrote an email to the artist’s studio, in rudimentary Portuguese: “I can help you with your work,” and received a response within 10 minutes.

She served as a full-time studio intern and, upon arriving in Rio de Janeiro , was given a place to stay at the artist-in-residency house adjacent to the emerging Escola Vidigal, an arts-and-technology after-school program that the studio had just founded in one of the hillside favelas. Because of the OCP’s open-ended structure, Chesebrough was able to pivot her three-month study to focus on the dynamic between the favela, the surrounding low-income neighborhood, and the artist studio, centered on the role of the arts school.

While students are off campus they maintain communication with their advisor who also visits them for a week to work with them in the field during the fifth week of the study. In the early years of the program, correspondence by mail took weeks each way. Today, communication is instantaneous.

“When we started the program, a letter from Greece literally took three weeks to get here and if the advisor wrote back immediately it took another three weeks to reach the students,” said Hawks. Phone service was also limited, which contributed to the immersive feel of the program.

Curry noted this lag in communications required students to think on their feet and adapt to different situations. If they arrived at a study site that was under construction or otherwise not available, they had to figure out what to do. “If they waited for a response, their semester would be almost over,” he said. While today, students can consult with their advisors with more ease, a sudden change in the study plan isn’t unusual.

“Students realize things aren’t quite as well structured in the world as they are in the classroom or at home. Adapting to changing situations and dealing with uncertainty is part of the learning process for students,” said Johnston.

Hannah Noll ’20 planned to focus her studies in Rotterdam on contemporary, urban green infrastructure projects. “Like the northeastern United States, Rotterdam receives a lot of rain, so there is high demand for spaces that filter urban runoff and help with flood mitigation,” she wrote in an email.

However, once onsite, she discovered something else that interested her. “After visiting all the contemporary green infrastructure projects in the city, I noticed a trend; the surrounding neighborhoods were also contemporary, urban and promoting sustainability in other ways.” Her study focus shifted to these neighborhoods and the ways they were addressing sustainability.