History
InterFuture, whose name stands for “Intercultural Studies for the Future,” is a registered 501(c)3 organization that trains and supports a small class of promising students annually in conducting intercultural research. InterFuture was established in Princeton, New Jersey in 1969, as a not-for-profit educational organization and has continued for 50 years as a growing network of alumni and internationally-minded academic and other professionals who support scholarly research. Students who qualify as InterFuture Scholars become part of an exceptional group of outstanding, imaginative undergraduates from around the United States (and from outside) who are given the remarkable opportunity to design and carry out a personalized intercultural research project. Over the last 50 years, 420 InterFuture Scholars have completed the InterFuture program in cooperation with 54 colleges and universities.
Mission
Our goal is to offer one of the most exciting and challenging summer programs in intercultural education available to undergraduates in the U.S., combining honors programming, cultural immersion, and undergraduate research.
We are committed to intercultural research, international understanding, and providing talented undergraduate students with unparalleled opportunities for intellectual and emotional growth. The heart of the InterFuture program is individualized preparation for and one-on-one experience in study abroad, an approach that personalizes, intensifies, and magnifies the impact of the individual’s exposure to new political, social, economic, and cultural environments, and to new aspects of her or his own awareness.
The ideal of intercultural education is to help students develop perspectives from which they can recognize cultural contrasts and begin insightfully to formulate comparative questions about them: to challenge their accustomed ways of seeing and judging, and to find footing in a foreign environment, which comes only with knowledge of the paradigms and dynamics of both home and host cultures. In this process, knowledge, empathy, and reserving judgment are invaluable.
Goals
The primary goals of InterFuture’s intercultural program are:
- firstly, to enhance students’ sensitivity to and understanding of the inner workings of other cultures;
- secondly, to teach them to appreciate and respect these cultures as they do their own;
- and thirdly, to lead them to self-reflection, and to re-evaluation of both the culture visited and their home culture.
Approach
Each year we assemble a group of outstanding, imaginative undergraduates from around the United States, from diverse cultural/ethnic backgrounds, and from all academic fields–social sciences to humanities, natural sciences to business and management–who will be provided the remarkable opportunity to design and carry out, in the U.S. and overseas, personalized intercultural research projects, designed to reflect participants’ various interests. InterFuture’s aspiration is for Scholars to become, over time, members of the community of InterFuture volunteers who pass forward their opportunities and experience by themselves participating in the organization’s training and advisory activities.
InterFuture encourages in its participants an awareness of humanity’s precarious position in the world and a consequent willingness to seek–through experience–the tools, materials, and criteria by which we may live with ourselves and each other, while preparing for our planet’s future needs.
To facilitate intercultural interaction, observation, dialogue, and cooperative analysis, InterFuture Scholars interact while abroad primarily with advisors, scholars, families, and other individuals and groupings from within the cultural locale being visited.
Through these approaches, tested and honed over 50 years of field experience, InterFuture aims to provide summer intercultural education of the highest quality to students from cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the widest possible diversity, based on the conviction and on our experience that such diversity expands the minds and tests the preconceptions of all participants.
Philosophy
Of the experiences available to undergraduate students, study abroad is among those with the greatest potential to add, through cultivation of cross-cultural sensibilities, the most practical value for a student’s future employability or graduate/professional education. Whether a student majors in economics or humanities–a well-crafted study abroad experience results in personal growth and enhanced understanding of the “Other” so necessary in the world we live in. Through its focus on helping participants acquire and sharpen these intercultural skills, InterFuture offers maximum value for monetary investment.
Study abroad should not be an exercise in touristic exoticism, but rather an experience in how to integrate difference into one’s world. The InterFuture program aims to allow participants to get the most out of their time overseas, and not to settle, as study abroad participants too often do, for only a small fraction of what a study abroad opportunity has the potential to offer them.
As participants become more aware of the ways in which they are products of the American (or other countries’) cultural paradigm, InterFuture participants come to understand better their position and biases as “participant-observers” in non-U.S. culture(s). They thus become better able both to understand the culture that they are visiting and to appreciate (and, to some degree, to compensate for) the “American” (or non-American home culture’s) characteristics, attitudes, and preconceptions that influence their perception and valuation of the “Other.” Once acquired, these techniques and skills of intercultural parallax can be applied constructively in the future to any cross-cultural interactions, whether in the U.S. or internationally, in which the trained individual finds her- or himself.
InterFuture aims to heighten cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity in our participants through a judicious combination of:
- intensive pre-departure training in how to consider challenging, existential aspects of culture and understand them through intercultural research skills,
- formulation and execution of an independent intercultural research project,
- and on-locale cultural immersion and personal, individual encounter with the “Other.”
Through the collaborative educational, research, and learning experiences involved, we aspire to nurture, in participating students and in participating academic and non-academic professionals alike, sensibilities supportive of international community (scholarly and otherwise), solidarity, and cooperation
We believe that study-abroad programs have a profound and lasting impact on the attitudes and perceptions of participants in direct proportion to (1) the amount and intensity of preparation that precedes the sojourn overseas and (2) the degree to which students are required to interact, as individually, directly, and intensively with the people and the culture of the study-abroad locale(s). The InterFuture program makes these two crucial features available to participants to a much greater degree than most college-run, group-oriented study-abroad programs.