Spring Break Offers Chance to Explore

Spring break, as one of the longest breaks during the school year, creates a lot of excitement on campus. Although most students choose to go home during this time, students now have a variety of options to go on a trip with other Exonians, both students and faculty, to eye-opening locations within and outside the country to immerse themselves in fresh environments.Students can go to Utah for a nine-day backpacking trip in the canyon area, California to observe the filmmaking process from page to screen, and China to experience in-depth its culture and progress. “Both of those trips are under the umbrella of Exeter Explorations--the range of domestic trips we first developed last Thanksgiving to provide students with vacation opportunities to explore different areas of the United States and to connect with alums who are working in a range of professional fields. These trips are open to all students,” Director of Global Initiatives Eimer C. Page said.

This year, students will have the opportunity to visit China as a part of the spring break programs.

Last year, the Academy experimented with a flagship spring break trip to India. “One of the classes I took lower year was Modern India with Mrs. Merrill, and I’ve always been interested in the culture of India. I had never really gotten a chance to travel outside of the U.S. before, so I thought it would be a great opportunity, especially because it was the first student-faculty trip,” senior Megan Do, who was part of the trip to India last spring, said. “Going to India helped me realize the central essence of the human experience, whether you are a rural villager in India or a teacher or student at Phillips Exeter Academy.”This year, students will have the opportunity to visit China as a part of the spring break programs. Six faculty and six students will trek across the Great Wall and visit the cities of Beijing, Chengdu, and Chongqing.According to Page, the trip will focus on the history of the growth and development of China since 1976 and the ascendancy of Deng Xiao Ping’s economic policies; visits to development ministries and business professionals; meeting in Chengdu with researchers doing field-work on the sustainability of China’s building-boom and environmental action groups focusing on development and urban migration trends; a visit to an organization that is working on sustainable agriculture and land-use practices; and a visit to Chongqing to explore street jobs through the lens of the migrant laborer.Domestic trips will also be available for students during the break. One group of students will examine the movie industry from page to screen in Los Angeles, California, for four to six days. Another group will be heading to a nine-day wilderness trip run in conjunction with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) to Utah’s Canyon Country.English teacher Jason BreMiller will be chaperoning the nine-day backpacking trip in south-central Utah, which Exeter developed through a partnership with NOLS. The leadership school has been around since the 1960s, offering expeditions ranging from four-week to semester long all over the word. NOLS places an emphasis on the leadership component of the backpacking experience and is “widely recognized as the best, most competent wilderness education institution in the world,” BreMiller said.BreMiller has worked as an instructor for NOLS and has led expeditions to Southern Utah in March a number of times with Hotchkiss and Taft. “There is no better place to be than Utah in March,” he said. “The days are crisp and beautiful-- 65 degrees with cloudless skies--and the slick rock warms up when the sun clears the canyon rim.”On the Utah trip, the course will provide a combination of explicit leadership training and hands-on technical instruction for how to travel well in a wilderness context, according to BreMiller. The NOLS program will teach students a combination of technical skills, including map reading, off-trail navigation, reading the terrain, selecting campsites, cooking on a backcountry stove, and soft skills of expeditionary behavior and group dynamics, including communicating effectively, resolving conflicts on the field, making effective decisions, and the whole array of interpersonal group dynamic skills.“Backcountry travel, for me, becomes a metaphor for real life--it’s a way of amping up the consequences in a controlled setting,” BreMiller said.BreMiller also looks forward to sharing with the students one powerful aspect of being outdoors: the stillness. This trip provides the space to break the “vortex of busyness that many of us get sucked into in Exeter,” the space to “hear [themselves], thoughts that may have been ruminating for weeks or days or years,” he said.