On March 5, IU announced university-sponsored international spring break trips had been canceled. Some of these trips included places such as Indonesia, Berlin, Guatemala and Mexico.
So far, no word has been given to students about refunds for program fees or airline tickets, and no alternatives have been brought to the students to make up the one credit they would have earned.
“University leadership made the decision because of the rapidly evolving nature of the outbreak and with overall concern for the health and safety of IU students,” the statement reads.
IU administration also wants to reduce the chances that student travelers could become subject to additional U.S. and foreign travel restrictions while abroad, according to the statement.Study abroad programs traveling domestically will continue as planned.
Anusuya Bandyopadhyay, a sophomore studying neuroscience, was planning on traveling to Riobamba, Ecuador, with Medlife, a student organization that partners with poor communities to improve their access to medicine, education and community development, according to its website. The students were going to be working in a mobile clinic there during the week of spring break.
“I was really excited to go,” Bandyopadhyay said. “It would have been my first spring break trip, and because I’m pre-med I would have gotten a lot of experience.”
This trip was not for class credit but would have allowed students to earn first-hand experience in the healthcare field. The Medlife mobile clinics provide healthcare directly to communities that may lack access to health services, according to their website.
The Medlife program has reached out to students about receiving a voucher to make up for pre-paid travel costs or instead going on a trip to Peru during the summer because of the spring break cancelation, Bandyopadhyay said. There have been at least six confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ecuador, according to BBC.
“It’s a good precaution for the university to take as a whole, but for our trip specifically I think it was a little unnecessary,” she said.
Junior Andres Ayala was planning to travel to Indonesia as part of a semester-long Hutton Honors College course on nongovernmental organizations.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not have a travel warning or risk level for Indonesia, but multiple cases have been confirmed in the country.
“There’s always going to be a risk,” Ayala said.
Ayala has traveled with the Hutton International Experiences program twice before. He went to China last spring break and to the Netherlands in summer 2018. In the weeks leading up to the trip, Ayala said that Hutton was constantly and openly communicating with the students involved in order to ensure their health and safety.
Senior Katie Janoski, studying environmental management, planned on traveling to Berlin over spring break with the O’Neill School of Environmental and Public Affairs to study metropolitan development there.
“If I could still go I definitely would, even if it meant coming back and being quarantined off-campus,” Janoski said. “But it makes sense to cancel the trips because the campus is so large, a virus like this could spread really quickly.”
For the duration of the one-credit program, students would have taken a class in the mornings and explored Berlin in the afternoons. A graduate student in Janoski's group needed that credit in order to graduate, Janoski said. Students are waiting for the university to give them more information about refunds and making up the credit, she said.
“I feel like they should have been more transparent from the beginning,” she said. “The cancelation was very much out of the blue.”
