This Winter Study, I had the opportunity to travel to Sint Maarten and develop conservation, land use, and environmental resilience policy with Nature Foundation St. Maarten and the European Union.

Throughout the experience, I received an open water diving license, swam with sea turtles and sharks, took a nap with a manta ray 60 feet underwater, helped conduct marine research field work, ate delicious Creole food, met great friends and amazing colleagues, and helped make meaningful change on an island being ravaged by climate change and poor environmental regulations. 

Sint Maarten doesn’t have zoning restrictions or protected land areas. The marine protection laws it has lack teeth and are consistently disregarded by cruise ship and resort companies. 

With the Nature Foundation, an organization that aims to protect the natural resources of the island through preservation, research, and legal initiatives, I contributed to pushing environmental legislation through parliament and found incentives for the establishment of national parks and zoning laws.

Using satellite imagery and data analysis tools, I projected the spread of land development and created an economic argument for how and why the government of Sint Maarten should establish nature preserves on the island.

All that said, my experience is an outlier. Knowing I wanted to travel over Winter Study, I had saved money over the summer. My existing financial aid package offered me a generous grant, which I put towards the plane tickets and housing. My family helped where they could, and I had an internship supervisor who generously let me stay on her couch for the first week to lessen the financial burden of an apartment. But without each of these opportunities, none of this would have happened.

There are a lot of people at the College for whom an internship experience like this one would have been impossible. The College has an incredibly generous all-grant financial aid system, and being someone who could not have attended the College without significant help from it, I am beyond grateful for that. However, funds directed to support students doing internships abroad during Winter Study are much more limited. 

From my experience, the College has also not made it a priority to advertise these opportunities particularly well to students on financial aid. My Winter Study experience is rare, and at a place that prides itself on educational flexibility and opportunity, that’s quite sad.

I believe that the opportunity to use Winter Study to pursue something you couldn’t have otherwise explored is as — if not more — valuable than in-classroom education. Studies show that experiential learning both teaches students more than classroom learning and makes classroom learning more effective, bolstering students’ motivation and interest when in the classroom.

This de-emphasis on experiential learning comes in the face of news that the College is reevaluating Winter Study. I strongly believe that would be a significant mistake. 

Winter Study has so many strengths: It is an experiential learning powerhouse; it provides students with internship opportunities across the globe; it gives students doing independent studies the chance to personalize their education; and through classes with alums and other teachers passionate about something experiential, engages students in areas they might never otherwise have engaged with. 

The College should double down on the programs that send students to foreign countries, connect them with amazing and diverse alums, teach them a speciality skill, or give them free reign to explore what they are passionate about.

However, faculty and administration are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with Winter Study. Many professors seem to think that the month of January leads to a “loss of purpose” in the overall coherence of the academic year. However, the College hasn’t done much to solve the problem other than handing around exemptions to certain faculty. If the College wants to make Winter Study more productive and less of a burden for its teachers, then it should focus less on revising what doesn’t work, and more expanding what does. 

The first step? Make programs such as SPEC 21 internships more accessible for students on financial aid, without requiring months of preparation and a very understanding boss. Then encourage students to participate in these classes, and make the application process as easy as possible. 

For standard classes, encourage more notable and successful alums to come and teach. Then, while you’re at it, maybe end the madness that is the instructor requirement for Winter Study. Instead of making teachers without the clout to get exemptions teach Winter Study classes, find those who actually want to teach something and support them.

Winter Study is a beautiful thing. It was one of the main reasons I chose the College, and the same is true for many of my peers. To me, it is worth almost more than a full semester at the College. I hope that instead of scrapping the whole thing, the College can make experiences like mine the norm.

Felix Diaz ’26 is from Arlington, Mass.