Travel with Purpose. Learn with Passion.

When you participate in travel study with the Graham School, you immerse yourself in timeless texts and engaging discussions with your fellow students as well as the scholar who leads the trip. Throughout your journey, you participate in intellectually engaging experiences that situate your course texts in new contexts. With guidance from experts, you come to understand the greater significance of the places and artifacts you encounter along the way.

The Spring in Greece trip is only open to Basic Program students and alumni. Our other trips are open to the entire community of Graham students. There is no degree requirement to attend, but we seek participants who are eager to engage actively in the experiences and discussions that occur throughout the trip.

We schedule these trips outside of our academic quarters to minimize overlap, so students can participate without missing classes. Travel experiences occur throughout the year, allowing you to select the options that fit your schedule: explore Greece during the fall or spring, head to the University of Oxford at the end of the spring term, or come to UChicago’s Hyde Park campus in the summer for a residential seminar.

All participants are strongly encouraged to complete the advance reading assigned before their trip to get the most from the seminars, lectures, and discussions. Graham School travel study courses are designed to foster deep engagement with literature, history and complex societal issues, but also to be accessible to people with a wide variety of educational and professional backgrounds.

There can be quite a bit of walking on both the Greece and Oxford trips (often 3-5 miles a day). While Oxford typically requires fewer steps in a given day, many of the historic buildings at the University of Oxford do not have elevators, so students do need to walk up several flights of stairs. Be sure to check the full details for the trip you’re interested in to better understand the mobility requirements.

Before the departure date, participants are invited to attend a virtual gathering. This is an excellent opportunity to get to know one another prior to the trip.