One of the main attractions of Boston University’s College of General Studies is the Boston-London program. But current sophomores and juniors were unable to travel due to the pandemic. Now, they will have the chance to travel abroad in the upcoming summer.
CGS announced Nov. 17 that it would be offering the “London Experience” — a one-week trip in May available to the CGS Classes of 2023 and 2024 students to make up for the lost six-week London trip.
CGS Dean Natalie McKnight said in an interview she doesn’t think the trip will be canceled, citing there are currently students studying abroad at the London campus and high COVID-19 vaccination rates make it “a completely different situation” than before.
“The big difference now is that pretty much everybody at BU is vaccinated,” McKnight said. “That certainly was not the case in 2020. We didn’t have the vaccine yet, and even in May 2021, a lot of people hadn’t been able to access the vaccine yet.”
CGS is aiming to keep the cost around $800 per student, depending on how many students enroll, according to an email sent to both CGS classes.
Compared to the traditional six-week Boston-London program, the London Experience program will be entirely experience-based rather than classroom-based, McKnight said.
“Not a single hour that they’re there will be spent in a class,” McKnight said. “It’s all experiential, it’s all creative … less time, but less pressure, too.”
McKnight said students in the program will complete either a video, blog, song, poem or another creative form of reflection of the trip. This will earn them a Hub credit for the Creativity/Innovation unit.
She said while the London Experience is just one week, the incoming 2026 CGS freshman will be traveling to London for the regular six-week summer program.
“Obviously, it’s shorter and there’s nothing we can do about that because of just the need to accommodate the incoming class and other BU programs there,” McKnight said. “We just do not have the capacity to run a longer program.”
McKnight said around 300 out of 1,100 total CGS sophomores and juniors reported in a poll that they were interested in attending the week-long trip.
Nyayian Biel, a sophomore in CGS, said she was “on the fence” about attending because one week doesn’t seem like enough time to visit London.
“I’ve heard from other past CGS students and how they went to different cities in the UK and how they traveled all around Europe during that six-week period,” Biel said. “It just seems we’re not going to get the same experience, and it’s not going to be as worth it as people have found it to be in the past.”
Biel said she isn’t sure if she will end up participating depending on the cost.
“Eight hundred dollars doesn’t seem that much right now,” Biel said. “I’m willing to wait for the total price.”
Abby Balter, a former CGS student who is now a junior in the College of Communication, said she appreciates the effort behind creating the program, but the trip didn’t seem worth it.
“It’s been two years, and obviously it’s not [CGS’s] fault that COVID happened, but I got over it now,” Balter said. “Yeah, it sucked at the time, but now it’s OK, I moved on.”
Part of what would have made the original six-week program in London special, she said, was the opportunity to connect and form a tight-knit circle.
“Now, all of us are out of [CGS], we have our own friend groups,” Balter said of having left CGS’s two-year program. “At this point, we’ve kind of already missed that opportunity.”
CGS sophomore Kripa Paudel said she wants to go to London for the experience, even if it’s just for a week.
“Personally, I thought [the cost] would be more,” Paudel said. “If there’s more people and if it goes down, then that’d be even better.”
CGS sophomore Naysha Kola said she doesn’t think the London Experience would be worth the cost.
“I remember when they were talking about planning a trip for people who didn’t get to go, a lot of people assumed that it would be free,” Kola said.
McKnight said she’s excited and thinks the program will be a memorable experience for students.
“I promised them if it was humanly possible to get them over there, to have a London experience, we would do it,” McKnight said. “And we’re going to do it.”
