With the fall semester winding down, Interterm courses for 2025 will officially start on Jan. 6. While this seems far away, it will come quicker than expected for everyone. This year, there will be 15 courses offered over Interterm, all covering a variety of topics and some even traveling to a variety of places around the world.
Professor of Psychology Dr. Robyn Long and Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. Katherine Soll will be co- teaching the course Medicine and Healthcare in Costa Rica. In January of 2023, Long taught a course very similar, the structure was essentially the same and the biggest difference between the two was the location was in Argentina last winter. Long and Soll wanted to create a program that would expose students to medical Spanish.
“So many of our healthcare workers are going to have bilingual demands in their workplace,” said Long.
With this in mind, Long and Soll wanted to create a program that would expose students to medical Spanish. This class will offer students the chance to shadow in different hospitals and clinics while also having the standard classroom time to work on students’ medical Spanish vocabulary skills. With this being a travel course, students will also be able to build on and learn important cultural skills and have many different cultural experiences.
Associate Professor of History John Richards will be teaching a course offered on campus called Get the Lead Out: Tabletop Wargaming and History. This will be Richards 12th time teaching this course and it is one of his favorites to teach because of his personal interest in the history of warfare and painting and playing with soldier figurines as a child. Students asked to “play the game” with the figurines after seeing Richard’s personal collection of toy soldiers.
Richards says this class is a “fun and sneaky” way of teaching important aspects of history and warfare. Students in the class are researching, finding strategies and tactics and working to win the final battle, which counts as the class final.
“The final is listed for three hours, but I have had students who want to finish the entire battle. One year students came back for a total of seventeen hours during finals week to see who won the whole thing,” Richards said.
Professor of Education Dr. Charlsie Prosser will be teaching Explore KC, which is considered a hybrid class. This will be the first time this course will be offered and Prosser is optimistic that there will be student interest for the course. As a longtime resident of Raytown Mo., Prosser talked with students from surrounding local areas and international students that have not seen much in the Kansas City metro area.
“I have always loved the KC Metro area and talking with students, I heard that many do know what the area has to offer,” Prosser said.
Prosser has designed this course so that there is a hard emphasis on students’ choice, and students are able to “make their own itinerary” to locations around the area. The class will visit The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Museum of Deaf History, Arts and Culture all together, but all other options are up to students. She also mentioned that this class would be a great fit for students who have to stay on campus during Interterm for sports and other obligations.
“Students can visit places that have free or low admissions fees, but they can also build their itinerary to line up with sports schedules over the break,” Prosser said.
There are many other Interterm courses available for this upcoming interterm, these ones highlighted have a variety of different classroom and cultural experiences students can gain. Enrollment for Interterm 2025 and spring semester for 2025 opens on Oct. 28. Students should enroll as early as they can to not miss out on some great opportunities offered this interterm.
