Josie Schoenberg ’24 and other Guilford students will be researching and telling the stories of refugees in India. Closer to home – King Hall to be exact – Ashley Belnap ’25 and her classmates are examining business management theories through the lens of movies.

There’s something for everyone in Guilford’s three-week term, which began this week. Students are taking part in more than 60 classes across the campus and across the world.

Ashley took a human survival class during a three-week term her first year at Guilford. Last year she took a class introducing her to meditation and tantra. “They were great classes,” she says. “I like how Guilford gives you a chance to try different things and expose you to different ideas while you’re here, and those were very different for me.”  

This year Ashley wanted a class more aligned to her major. “Management With Movies” (BUS 221) explores management theories from Hollywood’s perspective. The class will watch classic movies and discuss leadership traits, power moves and conflict management skills that are exhibited by characters in the films. This week the class watched and discussed “12 Angry Men,” which portrays the dynamics at work when ordinary citizens confront the possibility of convicting a young man of murder.

Three days into the class and Ashley is hooked. “It’s cool,” she says. “I’ve never really thought about management in movies. It puts what you learn in class in a different perspective. We’re actually looking at the behavioral stuff we learn about in class play out in the movies.”

Josie is one of five Principled Problem Solving Scholars making the trip to India with Associate Professor of History Zhihong Chen and Political Science Lecturer Sonalini Sapra. The 17-day trip to New Delhi and later Dharamsala, India, is actually the culmination to a spring semester class on refugees and displaced populations.

Zhihong says students spent the spring getting “academically and mentally and emotionally prepared for the trip.”

The Tibetan refugee community in India, led by the Dalai Lama and his Dharamsala-based exile government for more than six decades, has long served as a model of success for displaced groups worldwide.

Zhihong says students interviewed refugees living in Greensboro during the spring semester to prepare them for their time in India. “The hope is to highlight refugees’ narratives and give voice, preserve their perspectives for the future,” says Zhihong. She says the interviews will be uploaded to a website dedicated to refugee narratives later this summer.

Guilford’s history with short academic sessions includes the January term, between fall and spring semesters, that was held as a pilot during the presidency of Kent Chabotar to offer more short-term study abroad and experiential learning opportunities. It was optional and was discontinued because it was not financially feasible or of interest for enough students.

Guilford began offering three-week terms for all students twice each academic year beginning in the fall of 2019 as part of the Guilford Edge initiative. This is the first academic year in which the 3-week term was only offered in the spring.