“When you go abroad to a country where people your age yearn to receive tertiary education but cannot afford the school fees, where the idea of continuous flowing electricity and water are not always a given...complaints about upcoming problem sets, 30-page papers and lack of a campus social life seem utterly ridiculous,” Duru writes in an e-mail.

History concentrator Flora M. Lindsay-Herrera ’05, who took history, psychology, sociology and literature classes in Santiago, says that she was better able to understand the history of Latin America by learning about the ways Chileans think and act.

“There are so many ways of approaching the world that you can’t learn at Harvard,” she says.

But almost universally, students who studied abroad say they had much lighter workloads and easier material in those classes in comparison to their Harvard experience.

Duru, whose courseload consisted mainly of a lecture series about Ghana, calls the classes “definitely easier.”

Language differences presented a challenge for Sara N. Lewis ’04 in Rio de Janeiro. But Lewis writes in an e-mail that she found that her classes on Brazilian Contemporary Economy, Portuguese, Brazilian History and Race Relations and Ethnic Identity in Brazil had a lighter workload than her Harvard classes.

Rather than prioritizing analysis and assuming comprehension, often the Harvard model, Katharine E. Jackson ’04 says that her classes in Australia “focused on learning the information, as opposed to really exploring it, the way we do here.”

Jackson took mostly large lecture courses on psychology, women’s studies and Australian culture.

Lindsay-Herrera says that she had far more free time in Chile than she did here, despite a four-course workload. Unlike at Harvard, her professors did not give near-constant feedback on her performance.

But whether a less challenging academic environment should be a deterrent to study abroad is an open question.

Edwards says she thinks students should not let the more traditional academic pressures prevent them from taking the time to experience another culture.

“Pretty much every place you go, it’s going to be somewhat less intense than it is here,” she says . “I want it to be challenging and rewarding, but I want it to...give them cultural experience as well.”

Nevertheless she says one of her priorities in evaluating potential programs will be their academic rigor.

And Steve Reifenberg, the regional program director of the center in Santiago, says that experiences abroad are challenging in ways that classes at Harvard can never be.

“If you ask the question a different way: was the overall international experience challenging?...I think you will get incredibly passionate and compelling answers about the value of studying in a different system, a different language, with students and professors with different assumptions, ” Reifenberg writes in an e-mail.