According to Anita A. Mortimer, coordinator of undergraduate studies in the economics department, interest in study abroad has increased greatly this year.

“We’ve always had a meeting in October [about study abroad]...at the last meeting we had many more students than in the past, at least twice as many students as we’ve ever had,” she says.

Other concentrations have also seen a similar rise in student interest.

Director of Undergraduate Studies for Social Studies Anya E. Bernstein says she has had sophomores inquire about study abroad, something that has not occurred in previous years.

Bernstein believes the increased interest is due to changing perceptions about study abroad.

“Students get the sense that there are onerous regulations from the College, so many hoops to jump through,” she says. “My goal [this year] has been to publicize study abroad since there has been this initiative.”

Departments are also considering structural reforms that would make it easier to have an international experience.

The history department has already changed its requirements for the class of 2005 in order to facilitate study abroad by eliminating the spring junior tutorial and course-intensive subject “tracks.”

Professor of English and American Literature and Language Elisa New, who is also a member of the Committee on Study Out of Residence, says that many departments now have an “overall readiness” to discuss changing the way study abroad will fit with other aspects of their concentrations.

New says that the English department aims to make study abroad “a more normative part of student experience” and wants to “see how study abroad fits within the concentration rather than threatening it.”

Specifically, the English department is looking to the history reforms as a possible model for how to restructure its concentration requirements.

New emphasizes, though, that some difficulties lie in the way of departments trying to create reforms to promote study abroad.

“Departments need to work so that

mechanisms of approval aren’t too inhibiting yet aren’t a rubber stamp,” she says.

Coatsworth says his committee’s goal is to work with departments to ensure that opportunities abroad are up to Harvard’s standards. The best way to do that, he says, is for Harvard to begin to create overseas programs of its own.