Encountering thieving monkeys is not a typical Winter Term experience. But that's exactly what sophomore Cheney Hagerup and her boyfriend, Joey Delporte, woke up to on their first morning in Costa Rica.
"Three of them even went into one of the rooms and took a girl's Vitamin D pills, Pringles and tampons," Hagerup said. "We watched them eating the pills and the Pringles."
Hagerup is one of just a few DePauw students who decided to embark on an adventure all on her own, without a professor alongside her to help.
This January, she is traveling in Costa Rica to "learn about the effects that service work can have, the best ways to go about doing service work, and to find some great opportunities to do service work."
Doing an independent Winter Term, rather than a faculty led one, involves a lot more planning. Hagerup booked her own flight, mapped out exactly where she is going to stay, and scheduled her own itinerary. She recently left San Jose and is currently staying in Montezuma, interviewing Peace Corps representatives and others to talk about service work as she travels from city to city.
Hagerup is not the only one who chose to fly solo this Winter Term. Sisters Ellen and Katharine Funke, a senior and sophomore, respectively, caught an early-morning flight Wednesday to the Grand Canyon. Though the sisters have been there before on family vacations, they feel that they will, "gain more from the experience now [they're] older."
As a junior, Ellen went on a faculty-led trip to Paris and Berlin, but she feels that she and her sister are having a much more independent Winter Term.
"We're really fending for ourselves here," Ellen said.
Their advisor, Russ Arnold, assists the girls while at DePauw. But when it comes to traveling, the Funkes are on their own. They planned the majority of the trip themselves, including mapping out individual projects to conduct while they're gone.
Arnold, a professor of religious studies at DePauw, who also taught Katharine's Freshman Year Seminar, has helped a lot in planning their excursion and has tried to, "give them a framework or angle through which to interpret or explain the experience."
Arnold has been an advisor for approximately one independent Winter Term a year for the past 5 or 6 years.
Independent Winter Terms often have a reputation for being easy projects, and Arnold admits that it is possible for students to slack.
"It really depends on the person and project," he said. He grades his students on, "the matter of the extent of the engagement with the question."
Ellen is doing a project on pilgrimage and heritage.
"I want to know why people need to go back to places - why are they so crucial?" Ellen said.
She has particular interest in the Muslim hajj, which is the largest annually occurring pilgrimage in the world where Muslims around the world revisit the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia to show their devotion to Allah (God in Arabic). Ellen hopes to learn what ties people to their homeland by researching why people return to the Grand Canyon.
She also is also comparing and contrasting pilgrimages and tourism. At the end of the trip, she will turn in a paper about her experience, though she describes it as, "more meaningful" than an average research paper because it will involve personal reflection and introspection.
"We've always had a distinct fascination with the west," Ellen says of her and her sister, though they have no actual ties to the Canyon.
Katharine is doing a project on memory and family, not solely about the Grand Canyon but about vacations in general. She goes back to the Grand Canyon in hopes that it will bring up some sentimental memories, and she describes her project as, "taking a more personal approach."
The sisters said they are, "very excited to do this together."
Both the Funkes and Hagerup have put a lot of planning into making their trips successful. Arnold said that by choosing to do an independent Winter Term, the trip is, "less packaged for them," and it, "gives them the opportunity to think about what it is they actually want to learn about."
