News

Improving the Odds of Completing High School on Time

SED-based Center for Promise studies what it will take to help more students

America’s on-time graduation rate is at an all-time high, with more than 80 percent of students walking across that coveted stage. But not everyone gets an equal share in the joy: African American, Hispanic, and low-income students graduate at rates significantly below the national average. For one group in particular, the chances of collecting a diploma are miserable. In five states, fewer than 50 percent of English-language learners (ELLs) graduate in four years; in two-thirds of states, the number is below 70 percent.

At the School of Education–based Center for Promise, researchers are studying what it would take to get more students graduating on time; the goal is to get the national rate above 90 percent by 2020. One way to help many states, including Massachusetts, step over that threshold is to increase the number of ELLs earning the right to wear a cap and gown. The Bay State graduated 87.3 percent of its class of 2015; the rate for ELL youth, who make up roughly a tenth of students, was 64 percent.

“When we look at the data around ELL students in this country, the graduation rates are some of the worst among any subgroup; it’s not that they can’t succeed, but clearly something’s not going right,” says Jonathan F. Zaff, founder and executive director of the Center for Promise. The center studies the academic and social factors that help young Americans succeed—or not. “All young people have potential, and what we as a society need to do is align the strengths and resources of our community with what the young person needs.”

In 2017, the Center for Promise partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) on a study to “really get into the lives of youth whose first language is not English,” says Zaff, and to understand what it will take to improve their chances of prospering.

The researchers, funded by Pearson Education, a company that provides education publishing and assessment services, conducted a statistical analysis of statewide data, such as free lunch eligibility and grades, on more than 13,000 students whose first language is not English (FLNE)—a group that includes English language learners, plus those who’d previously mastered English, but at some point did not speak it. They also interviewed 24 Latinx (the center uses this gender-inclusive alternative to Latina or Latino) youth from across the state.

“When we look at the data around ELL students in this country, the graduation rates are some of the worst among any subgroup; it’s not that they can’t succeed, but clearly something’s not going right.”
—Jonathan F. Zaff

After compiling results, the team found many FLNE students were performing well—sometimes better than their native peers—and that the language spoken at home didn’t always dictate outcomes. For instance, among low-income Spanish-speaking students, those who were longtime residents of the United States had strong graduation rates; their peers who’d been in the country for fewer than two years struggled. Researchers found that one year might make all the difference for those stragglers—their graduation rates jumped significantly when five-year, rather than four-year, graduation figures were considered.

In their report, the researchers conclude that regardless of whether schools are constrained by laws or resources, educational programs don’t tend to reflect the diversity of FLNE students’ needs. Zaff, also an SED research associate professor in applied human development, says tailoring interventions for specific groups—internships and flexible schedules for older youth who may already be part of the workforce, language-learning programs for students’ parents—could “provide the support and opportunities that FLNE youth need to succeed academically.” He adds that the DESE is now working with a coalition of school districts to implement strategies designed to keep FLNE youth in school.

It’s typical that the center, which is the research arm of America’s Promise Alliance—a coalition of more than 400 corporations, nonprofits, and professional associations—produced recommendations not solely focused on the classroom. Its research projects frequently cover health, well-being, and other factors impacting a young person’s chances of success.

Zaff gives the example of “Don’t Call Them Dropouts,” the center’s nationwide study of 18-to-25-year-olds that was supported by Target and published in 2014. Researchers found most dropouts didn’t deserve that label, concluding that toxic circumstances—violence at home, serious health issues, homelessness—“made schooling less salient to their lives, preventing them from finishing school,” he says. Many students found help hard to come by. When one of them, Antonio, tried to tell adults at school about his difficulties at home—including absent parents and an experience with homelessness—“they didn’t care,” he said in the report. “You know from the way that they come at me on a regular basis…they don’t try to talk to me.”

The center recommended starting community navigator programs—adults mentoring youth through traumatic life events—and school-based early-warning systems to flag students facing issues that could push them out of education. In a national follow-up study, Zaff says, the center concluded “it’s a ‘web of supports’ that youth need in order to stay on track in school or to reengage if they have disengaged.”

Zaff hopes that a greater appreciation for the adversities bombarding youth, especially those who might seem hard to reach or appear threatening to some adults, encourages more people—from teachers to school janitors—to make a connection with them. It can often be enough, he says, just to recognize the issues facing a young person and point them in the right direction for help.

“If we can start to change people’s understanding about who these young people are and about what they deal with on a daily basis, then we’ve made progress.”

Andrew Thurston can be reached at thurston@bu.edu.

Follow Your Ears

BU researchers study how people with hearing loss locate sounds

Virginia Best (above) and colleague Gerald Kidd are studying how people with hearing impairments locate sounds, a skill called spatial hearing. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.

The next time you’re at a loud party, close your eyes and listen. At first, the sounds are just a fog of noise. But quickly you begin to pick out individual voices and locate them, even without looking. This ability to locate voices using sound alone is called spatial hearing, and it helps listeners follow conversations in noisy places, like cocktail parties and restaurants. For people with normal hearing, it happens almost effortlessly. But people with hearing loss often have trouble with spatial hearing, even when they have hearing aids on. Why?

“This is a problem that conventional hearing aids don’t solve,” says Gerald Kidd, a Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, who heads BU’s Psychoacoustics Lab. “In a room full of people talking—a party, a social situation—sometimes people with hearing loss are lost and they disengage. It has a real human consequence.”

With the support of a five-year, $1.5 million National Institutes of Health grant, Virginia Best, a Sargent research associate professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences, will be examining how spatial hearing works differently in people with hearing impairments. The new research brings together Kidd and Best, the lead investigator, with experts in audiology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering: neuroscientist Barbara Shinn-Cunningham, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, H. Steven Colburn, an ENG professor of biomedical engineering, who develops neural models of spatial hearing, and Jayaganesh Swaminathan, a Sargent research assistant professor and a hearing aid researcher at the Starkey Hearing Research Center in Berkeley, Calif. Their discoveries may one day guide the development of new hearing aids that give hearing-impaired listeners the location information they have been missing, potentially solving the cocktail party problem in a way not currently possible with traditional hearing aids.

Just as having two eyes helps us locate things in three dimensions, our two ears help us pick out the location of sounds. “A sound off to the right gets to your right ear a little bit before it gets to your left ear, and it also tends to be a little louder in the ear that’s closer,” says Best. The differences are so small that we don’t consciously notice them: the time delay is just a matter of microseconds, and the volume difference (that is, the difference in sound pressure on the ear) can be as little as a decibel. Yet the brain uses this tiny ear-to-ear discrepancy to draw up a remarkably precise mental sound map, accurate to about one degree, that it uses to locate and focus attention on a single voice.

For people with hearing loss, though, this process breaks down, and Best wants to find out why. One hypothesis is that people with hearing loss are not getting the full timing and volume information they need to locate sounds accurately. Another possibility is that they are getting all the right information, but the brain cannot decipher it properly, so the resulting mental sound map comes out fuzzy.

Before they can begin to test these ideas, Best and her colleagues must first figure out how to untangle spatial hearing from other functions that are undermined by impairments. This is tricky, because although we often think that people with hearing loss experience the world with the volume knob turned down, the reality is more complicated. For some listeners, low-pitched sounds are clear while high-pitched sounds are muffled, for others, it’s the other way around, while still others experience distortion all across the sound spectrum. “We want to estimate how much of the real-world difficulty experienced by a person with hearing loss can be attributed to the audibility of sounds, and how much can be attributed to spatial factors,” says Best. “These results could also help guide our colleagues in audiology and in the hearing-aid industry to focus their efforts in the appropriate places.”

Next, Best and her colleagues will bring volunteers into the lab to test their spatial hearing. Using headphones and arrays of loudspeakers, they will find out how well people with hearing impairments can locate the sources of computer-generated sounds. Similar experiments have been done before, but unlike those earlier studies, the new experiments will use speech-like sounds instead of electronic beeps. “Our sounds will still be computer-generated, but they will be more natural in their acoustical structure and their content,” says Best. By using realistic sounds, she hopes to more closely mimic the challenges hearing-impaired listeners face in the real world.

While the researchers will compare hearing-impaired volunteers with volunteers who hear normally, they will also be looking for differences within the hearing-impaired group. The goal is to see if some subgroups—for instance, elderly people—have bigger spatial hearing losses than others. In the past, it has been difficult for them to isolate pure hearing loss from normal aging, because they so often go hand in hand. But Boston, with its large population of students and other young people, is an ideal place to study hearing loss clear of age-related confounds.

Best and her colleagues will also be taking a closer look at how listeners tune in to specific speakers in noisy environments. This process of zeroing in happens quickly and automatically for people with normal hearing, usually within just a few words or sentences. Best wants to find out whether listeners with hearing loss experience something similar and to discover more about how it happens.

Ultimately, the researchers hope that they can use what they learn to help build better hearing aids. Some new noise-reducing hearing aids send exactly the same sounds to both ears, blotting out potentially helpful spatial cues. But, says Best, “there are ways of maintaining some of that spatial information, and it might be that different listeners need that to different extents, depending on how sensitive they are to that spatial information.” Best and Kidd have already tried this on a version of their visually guided hearing aid, an experimental device that uses eye tracking to guide a beam of amplification toward sounds coming from a particular direction. Early results are promising, but, says Kidd, it will take more basic research to invent a hearing aid that can untangle the cocktail party problem. “The real essence of the problem, the ability to hear one talker in uncertain and difficult situations,” he says, “is something that hasn’t been solved yet.”

Author, Kate Becker can be reached at kate@spacecrafty.com.

Hearts, Minds, and Microbubbles

Sargent, ENG profs collaborate to prevent strokes that cause dementia

BU faculty Tyrone Porter and Kathleen Morgan are using a $2.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to develop a drug, and a delivery system, that may help prevent blood vessels from bursting and causing early-stage dementia. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.

• Stiffened arteries can cause microbleeds in the brain, possibly leading to dementia
• A prototype drug might control artery stiffness
• Microscopic bubbles and ultrasound beams could deliver the drug straight into artery walls

Memory loss in old age starts small, with misplaced keys or wallets. In some people, it can be the sign of a far more serious disorder. Dementia can eventually set in, robbing people of the memories of faces, names, and important events. It’s devastating for both patients and family members—and it’s distressingly common. According to the World Health Organization, more than 47 million people currently suffer from dementia worldwide.

While Alzheimer’s disease is probably the most well-known form, dementia also comes in other, lesser-known varieties, like vascular dementia—caused when tiny blood vessels burst in the brain, leading to microstrokes and minute bleeds. The resulting condition is closely linked with other age-related memory disorders.

“I suspect that vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s are really just two different angles on the same disease,” says Kathleen Morgan, a Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences professor of health sciences. “There are plaques in the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s patients that are visible at autopsy, but we know that if you have them, you’ll probably see evidence of microbleeds as well.”

And if burst blood vessels are implicated in early-stage dementia, Morgan says, it may be possible to stop that damage before it starts. With a $2.5 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA), she is examining a synthetic prototype drug that could prevent microbleeds in mouse brains. She’s joining forces with Tyrone Porter, a College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering, working across disciplines to develop a new delivery system for the drug. Their solution uses a novel system of microbubbles—tiny bubbles of inert gas smaller than capillaries—along with a focused ultrasound beam to help push the drug into a very specific part of the body: the large blood vessels next to the heart.

Most brain bleeds, Morgan says, actually start in the aorta, the body’s largest artery, which connects directly to the heart. With each beat, the heart exerts enormous amounts of pressure straight onto that conduit, which is made of smooth muscle cells that expand and contract like a rubber hose as blood flows past them. “Those smooth muscle cells are very important for controlling the pressure of your vascular system on a beat-to-beat basis,” she says.

In younger bodies—both mouse and human—smooth muscle in the aorta expands with each beat, acting as a sort of shock absorber for the pressure coming out of the heart. In older bodies, though, it becomes gradually less elastic, meaning that the energy of each pulse travels farther through the vascular system. If the aorta becomes stiff enough, blood can surge at high pressure straight into tiny, sensitive blood vessels in the brain, which may burst under the strain.

Morgan is developing new ways to reverse the stiffening of arteries. If she can restore some of the aorta’s elasticity, she reasons, it may be possible to prevent new microbleeds. To test this idea, she’s concocted a new peptide—a small chain of amino acids—that can control smooth muscle stiffness.

Morgan and Porter’s drug delivery system. The scientists attach the drug to microbubbles smaller than capillaries and use a focused ultrasound beam to guide the bubbles and then burst them, delivering the drug directly into smooth muscle cells. Eventually, they hope their system may be used to deliver drugs to the large blood vessels next to the heart. Illustration by Tyrone Porter.

In smooth muscle tissue, she says, elasticity is determined in part by two types of long, stringy molecules called actin and myosin, which form a web inside each cell. As the two strands latch onto each other, they restrict the cell’s movement, stiffening its structure. “It’s a bit like a Chinese finger trap,” says Morgan. “The harder you tug on actin, the harder it clamps down.” The peptide her team has created, however, can effectively stop this process in its tracks by binding to the molecules, preventing them from grabbing onto their counterparts in the first place. As a result, the cell remains relaxed and supple. Morgan can control how stiff or loose the tissue gets by controlling the amount of peptide she administers.

The challenge is delivering those molecules directly to the smooth muscle inside a living aorta. Unlike other drugs, releasing this one system-wide—or even artery-wide—could be disastrous. “Smooth muscle tissue isn’t just in the aorta. It’s in your vascular system, urinary tract, uterus, lung tissue, and digestive system,” she notes. “If the peptides got into those tissues, it could cause incontinence, premature labor, all sorts of awful things.”

To get the drug exactly where it’s needed, however, you first have to dig into the artery itself.

“The cells we need to target don’t come in contact with flowing blood. They’re behind a layer or two of other cells and connective tissue in the blood vessel walls,” says Porter. To break through those layers and deliver the drug directly to smooth muscle cells, he’s attaching Morgan’s peptides directly to the outside of each microbubble. Focused ultrasound can be used to push the microbubbles toward the aortic wall and pop them to release the peptide. The popping process also subtly and reversibly disrupts the lining of the aorta, making the blood vessel wall temporarily permeable. “Once that happens, the peptide can flow directly into the spaces that open up in the vessel wall and go straight into the smooth muscle tissue,” he says.

These microbubbles themselves are simple to make, Porter adds, and the FDA has already approved them for use. “Microbubbles have been used for years as contrast agents for ultrasound. They scatter sound much better than tissue, so they’re used to distinguish blood from the chambers in heart and surrounding muscle,” he says. They’re also tiny enough to fit through the smallest blood vessels in the body and eventually disappear as the gas, which is harmless, escapes into the blood and is expelled out of the body through the lungs.

In addition to being relatively safe, the clinical advantage of this approach is that it can be done with a standard ultrasound probe commonly used in a cardiac echo test. Using a low-powered ultrasound beam, a technician can track where the bubbles are going, then pop them at a specific location by simply turning up the strength of the beam. Existing ultrasound tools “can focus the beam down to the millimeter, so it’s extremely accurate,” Porter says.

Until now, Morgan has been able to test her peptide and its new delivery system only on smooth muscle cells in a petri dish. With the new NIA grant, however, she and her collaborators are looking to scale up their research, and they will use their approach for the first time on a living animal.

“My earlier work was just on the fundamental mechanics of these peptides. Moving into a whole mouse is a big leap for someone used to sitting at a bench dealing with cells,” she says with a laugh. “The people I’ve connected with here at BU make it feasible, though. That’s how you get basic discoveries translated into practical ones—you have lots of scientists working in parallel. You need teams instead of a single investigator.

Author, David Levin can be reached at delevin@bu.edu.

Can’t Find Your Keys? Don’t Panic

Memory lapses: MED prof’s book tells when to worry, when not to

Andrew Budson, a MED neurologist who specializes in treating patients with memory disorders, has written a book that can help with distinguishing between serious memory warning signs and normal lapses. Photo by Cydney Scott.

It took you half an hour to find your keys this morning. You forgot the name of a longtime colleague at a meeting yesterday. You got lost driving to a friend’s house last week—it’s true that you were more focused on NPR than the road, but you’ve made that drive countless times and you should be able to do it on autopilot.

Relax. All of these memory lapses are related to normal aging, says Andrew Budson, a School of Medicine professor of neurology, who specializes in memory disorders. They can happen to anyone.

Because we live in an age of multitasking and distracted attention, says Budson, we need to pay careful attention to form and retrieve memories. In his latest book, Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory—What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do about It(Oxford University Press, 2017), coauthored with Maureen K. O’Connor, a MED assistant professor of neurology, Budson writes that not paying sufficient attention is the main reason that healthy people get lost while driving to a familiar place or have trouble remembering names or where they put their keys.

Budson, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center Education Core and associate chief of staff for education at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, wants to help people worry less about their memories—and understand more about what’s happening inside their brains and what they can do about it. His book is intended to help lay readers recognize signs of memory problems that are more than just part of normal aging. He describes the markers of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases and emphasizes the importance of getting tested as early as possible if these markers are present.

The book also gives advice on how to discuss memory problems with your doctor. Budson explains how a doctor can evaluate memory and discusses what therapies are available to improve memory—and what things don’t work. With the currently available FDA-approved symptomatic medications—such as donepezil, available as a generic and as the brand Aricept—he says he can “turn back the clock” by 6 to 12 months to improve memory in patients with Alzheimer’s.

What doesn’t help, he says, are brain training games, crossword puzzles, and Sudoku; there isn’t enough evidence to show their effectiveness. Do them if you enjoy them, he says, not because you think they’re going to improve your memory.

“I’m trying to help people with the fear of Alzheimer’s disease,” Budson says. “The first thing people should know is that some memory problems are due to normal aging. The second thing is that many memory problems are due to things that are easily treatable and correctable, such as vitamin deficiencies and thyroid disorders, medication side effects, or even an infection.”

BU Today talked with Budson about his book, the “magic bullet” he recommends for brain health, strategies that can improve memory, and why it’s important to have a positive attitude about aging.

BU Today: What is the difference between normal aging-related memory problems and abnormal problems? 

Budson: In normal aging, we expect that information may need to be repeated a couple of times for it to become stored. We expect that one may need a hint or a cue to retrieve information. We expect it may take longer to retrieve the information than when the individual was younger. The key thing is that if the information got stored as a memory, you should be able to retrieve it with a little bit of time or a cue.

In abnormal memory, in a memory lapse that could be due to Alzheimer’s disease, the key finding is that there is a rapid rate of rapid forgetting. Information that was initially stored can’t be retrieved, even if you give a hint or a clue.

I want to stress that just because the memory is abnormal doesn’t mean it has to be due to Alzheimer’s disease. One reason we want people to come and see us in the clinic is that memory problems can be due to something simple that can be easily treated.

What are some questions you get asked most frequently about memory? 

People want to know if there is a magic bullet. I tell them there is a magic bullet. It’s called aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise—any activity that gets you breathing harder and gets your heart beating faster—releases brain growth factors that actually allow one to grow new brain cells.

Brisk walking is a good aerobic exercise. We recommend a minimum of 30 minutes of aerobic exercise a day at least five days a week. The data show that some aerobic exercise is good and more is better. If somebody is doing 30 minutes five times a week, well, that’s great—why don’t you do 30 minutes seven days a week? Why don’t you do an hour seven days a week?

Unfortunately, I don’t think we can prevent memory problems, but I do think that the evidence is we can delay them with aerobic exercise and some other activities. The other things that are very important include staying socially active and keeping a positive mental attitude. When one has a positive attitude about aging and life in general, one tends to take better care of oneself.

Why do you recommend the Mediterranean diet—heavy on fruits and vegetables, fish, olive oil, avocado, nuts, beans, and whole grains and with red wine in moderation? 

We’re not sure how it works, but it’s the only dietary change that has been shown to help people’s memory compared to a controlled diet. One way it helps the brain is by reducing risk factors for stroke, such as high cholesterol and diabetes. As we write in the book, not all studies support the idea that the Mediterranean diet is good for cognition and reduced risk of memory loss, but many studies do, and none of the studies reported any side effects that would caution against adopting such a diet.

What about sleep? 

Sleep can be tied up with memory problems. The first reason is obvious: if you’re tired, it’s hard to pay attention and if you can’t pay attention, you’re not going to remember things well. The second reason is that we now know that memories go from short-term storage to long-term storage when we sleep. If we don’t get enough sleep, we’re not going to be able to hold on to our memories for a lifetime.

What are some of your strategies for remembering names—and other things? 

Difficulty remembering names is something that everyone struggles with, whether they have normal memories or early Alzheimer’s. It really works to say the person’s name back when you meet someone. They say, “Oh, hi, my name is Sara,” so you say, “Oh, hi, Sara, it’s nice to meet you.” Then you can think of an association you have with that name: “Oh, Sara, I can remember that because it’s Abraham’s wife in the Bible and my Hebrew name is Abraham.” It’s really amazing how well these types of strategies work. 

What other strategies for remembering things have you been testing in your lab? 

Some of the research we are working on now shows that if someone works at being more mindful and really paying attention to the information they’re trying to remember, they’re going to remember it better.

Another finding is that if there is a piece of information you want to remember, think about that information in a way that it personally relates to you. This can also be applied to people’s names.

We’ve also shown that healthy older adults and patients with mild cognitive impairment can improve their memory by using mental imagery. For example, if someone’s name is Rose, you can remember their name by imagining a rose on top of their head.

You write that you’re optimistic about future treatments that may slow down the progress of Alzheimer’s and that it’s important for people to not be so afraid of it that they avoid treatment. 

There is a lot we can do for individuals who have Alzheimer’s disease today. Sometimes the knowledge that somebody understands what’s going on can be extremely empowering and helpful to families in terms of coping with everyday life. There’s no doubt that people can live in their homes longer if they figure out what’s causing their memory loss early and have it treated with medication and if they exercise, eat right, use strategies for remembering, and get help from friends and family.

It’s never good to have any disease, but if you have Alzheimer’s disease there is no better time to have it. In addition to the standard FDA-approved treatments, there are more drugs in clinical trials than ever before—more than 100 different compounds. Most of the compounds being developed are aimed at slowing down the progression of the disease.

At any one time, there are five to a dozen clinical trials going on that the majority of individuals diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer’s dementia can get into. That’s another reason to come into the clinic early.

I don’t want people to be sitting at home, becoming isolated, worrying about their memory, not wanting to be with friends and family because they’re worried people will notice their memory problems and then they would feel embarrassed. Just like you wouldn’t hide from someone that you have another disease—high blood pressure, say, or diabetes—it’s important not to hide from family and good friends that you are suffering from a memory disorder, even if that disorder is Alzheimer’s disease. If someone is going to shy away from you because you have Alzheimer’s disease, maybe they’re not such a good friend.

A Vacation with a Mission

BU students travel the globe, serving and learning, over spring break

Last year, students in BU’s Alternative Service Breaks program spent a week engaged in cleanup and other environmental initiatives at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia. Another group will visit the site this year. Photos courtesy of Alternative Service Breaks.

For many students, spring break is a chance to head to a tropical climate for some rest and relaxation. But a lot of Terriers take the opportunity to give back or to enhance their course work with fieldwork and travel.

This past Saturday, 275 students and many chaperones participating in this year’s Alternative Service Breaks (ASB) program traveled by plane, bus, and van to 29 locations across the United States and Canada to volunteer with various nonprofits in areas like public health, environmental reform, and immigrant and refugee services.

Brand-new this year is a trip to St. Louis, Mo., where students will work with two community partners: LifeBridge Partnership, which helps people with disabilities develop skills for living independently, and Almost Home, an organization that helps young mothers on the path out of poverty to self-sufficiency. They’ll coordinate social events at LifeBridge and help with painting and groundskeeping at Almost Home.

St. Louis trip coordinator Alex Navarro (CAS’19) says ASB has been an important part of his BU experience since he first went on a trip as a freshman. “Going on ASB that first year was especially transformative since it was one of the first major steps I took to get outside of my bubble. I was put into new situations, learned about new ideas, and discussed important issues with people I had barely known. It sounds uncomfortable and intimidating, and at times it definitely was, but it was overall a very rewarding experience and I loved every second of it. I want to enable others to enjoy and grow from this program like I have.”

BU volunteers cleaned up the Blue Ridge Parkway in Roanoke, Va., last year—but still had time for fun in the leaves. The trip is also on the agenda this year.

Three dozen School of Law students are spending the week performing pro bono legal work at sites from Maine to Michigan to Puerto Rico, partnering with local legal assistance organizations. For many, the decision to use their vacation to give back is personal.

Mario Paredes (LAW’18) is among those working with the Southern Poverty Law Center Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, La., providing legal representation to detained immigrants.

“Our role as law students will be to meet with detained immigrants, draft legal documents in support of their deportation defense claims, and interpret for attorneys,” says Paredes. “Our ultimate goal is to help protect the due process rights of detained immigrants, especially in light of recent and anticipated immigration enforcement actions by the federal government. This work is personal for me because I have many family members and friends who are directly affected by our immigration system and constantly fear for their safety and well-being. My parents originally came to the United States as undocumented immigrants from Guatemala, so I feel a deep sense of personal and communal obligation to use my privilege for the greater good.”

Similarly, for Chloe Sugino (LAW’20) personal connections are the reason she’s returning to her native Puerto Rico. She’ll be working with the nonprofit Ayuda Legal Huracán María, helping victims of Hurricane Maria file FEMA appeals.

“Puerto Rico is my home. I was born and raised on the island. Many of my friends and family members are still on the island, and they were all seriously affected after the hurricane,” she says. “This kind of pro bono work is important to me because, especially in this case, volunteer work fills in the gaps where government programs have fallen short or lacked the resources to provide services.”

Back by popular demand

And back by popular demand, the Questrom School of Business is again offering a variety of global experience courses for MBA students over spring break: Asia Field Seminar in Hanoi, Vietnam; Innovation Ecosystems in Israel; a Europe Field Seminar in Paris, France; and Digital Transformation: Immersive Interactions and Insights at Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto, Calif.

Students in the Asia Field Seminar, guided by Questrom senior lecturer Yoo-Taek Lee, are visiting companies throughout the region and examining the dramatic transformation of Vietnam’s economy in the last 30 years.

Led by Joseph LiPuma, a Questrom senior lecturer, students in the Israel program will examine how the young country, often referred to as the “Start-Up Nation,” gained its status as a global powerhouse in entrepreneurship. They’ll visit a number of tech start-ups and speak with the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who built them.

Students taking part in the Paris seminar, overseen by Frederic Brunel, a Questrom associate professor of marketing, will home in on France’s luxury goods industry, focusing on businesses serving niche industries, like private jets, high-end cosmetics, wine, and more. During the trip, they’ll visit a number of firms and meet with high-level executives.

Those enrolled in the Digital Transformation seminar, led by N. Venkatraman, Questrom’s David J. McGrath, Jr., Professor of Management, will visit major companies in Silicon Valley and meet with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to learn about the growing influence of information technologies in business, and the rapid digital transformation of businesses.

Students in Questrom’s Global Management Experience en route to Logan March 1. They are spending the week visiting start-ups, US multinational companies, and native publicly traded and privately held corporations in Shanghai and Bangkok to learn about business practices in Asia. Photo courtesy of Greg Stoller.

For the third consecutive year, Gregory Stoller, a Questrom senior lecturer in strategy and innovation, is leading a group of undergrads from across the University to Asia as part of the course Global Management Experience. The course goal, he says, “is to give students a boots-on-the-ground experiential learning opportunity to see how business is actually practiced in Asia.” Each year, he changes the countries, cities, and companies to keep the curriculum fresh. This year, students are visiting Shanghai and Bangkok.

“We have 10 company visits scheduled, which are a combination of entrepreneurial start-ups, US multinationals, and native publicly traded and privately held corporations, as well as BU alumni events in both cities,” Stoller says. Another trip goal is to leverage the company visits to create summer internships and permanent job opportunities.

Also again this year, Sargent College lecturer Adrian Wright-Fitzgerald is leading 13 undergraduate and graduate students on a nine-day service-learning trip to Guatemala. They will partner with Origins of Food, on an agroecology project addressing the social, environmental, and economic factors at play behind the country’s high malnutrition rate, traveling through Antigua, San Juan La Laguna, San Lucas Toliman, and Guatemala City. Among the trip highlights are tours of a food market and an organic farm in Antigua.

The opportunity to be part of trips that provide hands-on experience can be invaluable, says Willis Wang, associate provost for global programs.

“Not all students are able to participate in a traditional semester-long study abroad program,” Wang notes. “A well-planned short-term experiential opportunity, especially one that engages students in critical thinking, problem-solving, or decision-making, could spark a greater sense of curiosity about a culture or location, strengthen an individual’s passion to learn more about a particular topic, expose one to different views, encourage a student to study abroad, or enhance a feeling of independence and confidence—and these all would be wonderful results.”

BU Today would like to hear how you’re spending spring break. Email a photo to today@bu.edu, by Friday, March 9, and it could appear as a BU Today “Close-Up” the following week. Be sure to include your name, the school you’re enrolled in and graduation year, and a short caption to run with your photo; you should also identify any students (name, school enrolled in, and anticipated graduation year) or faculty (school and position) in your photo.

Author, Mara Sassoon can be reached at msassoon@bu.edu.