"[My wife and I] feel that the best way to get to know a culture is to work there and rub elbows with the people that really know it," Weissman says.

Ashley F. Waters '00, who used a Weissman grant to work on development issues in Udaipur, India last summer, says Harvard does not have many resources available to help students work abroad.

"The program is special because [the Weissmans] encourage you to do things outside of your academic field in a new context," Waters says. "There's an enormous difference between what you learn from [Stone Professor of International Trade] Jeffrey D. Sachs ['76] and what you learn that these organizations are actually doing on the ground."

Anjali Chelliah '00, who worked to increase AIDS awareness in India last summer, points to the value of applying what she learned in Harvard classrooms.

"The concept of international public health was very nebulous for me before I went to India and got to really experience the issues involved," she says.

The Weissmans take a personal interest in each intern's experience and the overall success of the program, even though they do not participate in day to day administration. Among the improvements Paul Weissman said he would like to see in the program are providing language training and allowing students to travel in the country of their internship.

Past interns say that once they were awarded the grant, they felt like part of a larger family of interns. The Weissmans help create this atmosphere by meeting with the group in the spring and fall, and corresponding with individual students over the summer. Paul Weissman says they were excited every morning to see if new e-mail messages had arrived from other parts of the world.

"They're kind of like two quasi-parental figures. They wanted us to write them a couple of letters while we were abroad. It helped us analyze what we were getting out of the experience," Hayes says.