“525,600 Minutes…”

If you’re like me, you read the title to this blog post and in your mind you began singing “how do you measure a year?” (Or maybe you were very confused, in which case I blame my New York origins and love for certain Broadway productions!) Nonetheless, this catchy show tune gives us the premise in many ways for the work we do in higher education - it invites us to consider, with all of the programming, reports, meetings, educational opportunities, co-curricular learning and variety of initiatives we offer our students and campus communities, how do we measure a year? How do we measure our successes, failures, and everything in between? How do we analyze what we could be better in a way that isn’t limited to, but includes, the anecdotal; in a way that is both qualitative and quantitative?

In thinking about yearly measurement, we may need to get a bit creative. Here at St. Mary’s we, at times, cast the net wide. The International Immersion Program began in 2014, when we designed a faith-based experiential learning opportunity for students that was - is - meant to be rooted in cross-cultural understanding, social analysis, and theological reflection. As a Catholic, Marianist university, it is imperative for us that we constantly search for new ways to put our mission into action, to discover new ways to build global community, and that we heed our founder, Father Chaminade’s call and challenge that “we are all missionaries.” 

We work with a small, Catholic non-profit program in Guayaquil, Ecuador called Rostro de Cristo, which offers mission opportunities for young adults from the United States to grow in their faith and understanding. The goal is not to go to do, but to “be” – not to build houses or hand out donations, but to ask hard questions, make oneself vulnerable, learn more about God and others, and to connect this learning to the journey of discovering one’s vocation – that is, discovering where the desires of one’s heart meets the greatest needs in the world.

            Obviously a goal very easily measured in quantifiable capacities.

            Sarcasm aside, how do we even begin to measure the success of this profoundly complex and subjective goal?

We ask our student participants to do a number of things. In addition to conversation and reflection sessions that happen before, during and after the immersion experience, they keep journals. These journals are where they begin to process and connect what they learn and read in class (this immersion experience rests in a Humanities elective course) with the raw reality of the world, and with their own hearts’ desires and calling.  With regularity they are asked to share their reflections with the group, sparking communal discussion about our responsibilities as educated global citizens in a world that endures a great deal of pain and injustice.

The vision of this experience to explore and grow in relationship with God, self, and others parallels the Core Curriculum at St. Mary’s. Therefore, each spring as their final project, the group prepares a public presentation on campus about the experience; how it aligns with our university’s mission and vision and how they see this experience as an integral component of learning more deeply about the Marianist charism. This articulation of the connection between our University’s mission statement and their lived experience abroad in many ways helps us (faculty/staff), to identify where we have succeeded and where we have failed, and discern how we can do this better next time.

Finally, we ask our students to consider how this is affecting their life choices. Will where they go to graduate school, the profession they pursue, or what they do immediately upon graduation be influenced by this experience? We certainly hope so. In the first two years of the program, in which participated a total of six graduating seniors, four of those seniors went on to do a year of post-graduate volunteer service – all four with faith-based organizations, three of the four returning to Ecuador with Rostro de Cristo. They all point to their undergraduate experience as a catalyst for that decision.

In the well-known Broadway tune, we are advised that the way to measure a year is in love. As we all know, love is not quantifiable, can be hard to describe, and is shown in a number of different ways. As I consider the students who have participated in our International Immersion Program and left St. Mary’s, and the choices they have made for their lives - in many cases as noted above directly connected to this experience - I believe that the late playwright Jonathan Larson was really on to something. We must measure in love the success of our work – love for the other and love for our neighbor, each of us working to serve and change a small part of the world.