“It’ll be my fourth time going to Nepal.”

A fellow senior and I were discussing class trips. He’d been on three to Nepal and was going on another one later in the semester. Getting two and sometimes even three university-sponsored trips to Nepal does not appear to be that uncommon for Political Science or Social Research and Public Policy majors.

These trips are an ingrained part of the NYU Abu Dhabi experience. They are part of what NYUAD touts in its battle to woo students. They are the distilled manifestation of its cosmopolitan-global-in-and-of-the-world rhetoric. Some students don’t seem to care about them; others actively pursue these trips, often approaching them as vacations, complete with Instagram posts and sneaking out of the hotel to enjoy a city that’s not in the UAE. Worries that students take particular classes just for the trips apparently motivated the Office of the Registrar to stop listing trips in class descriptions on NYU Albert and the NYUAD Student Portal, or at the very least, this no longer happens as it did during my first year.

I’ve been on three of these trips. I can say that I enjoyed them, that some of them have been better than others and that on the whole, they were positive academic and personal experiences. However, as they stand, many of these trips are deeply flawed. This is largely due to the culture that the NYUAD student body has built around them.

Occasionally, the trips are of questionable academic value. Guides who clearly lack knowledge, events that miss the mark of the class completely and more touristy activities are some of the most egregious examples from my personal experience. Sometimes hearing from individuals whose views disagree with or fit uncomfortably into the course’s or the professor’s explanation of a historical event or cultural practice can be particularly enlightening. One gets to experience the roughness and fragmented nature of these discussions in the real world, from people usually more closely associated with these topics and sometimes even with a higher stake in them than in a more sterile class environment. Those moments can be awkward and uncomfortable. For example, during my most recent class trip to Tanzania, when a question about homosexuality was asked, the professors on a panel we were attending and everyone else there were taken aback. It was a telling moment, if not an uneasy one.

The general rushed nature of the trips though, along with prevalent attitudes about what exactly the function of the trip is, has led to less academically-engaging experiences. When students are only free to sleep at one or two in the morning, and are asked to be in the hotel lobby at six — which happened during a trip I went on to Mumbai — and then are inevitably groggy and falling asleep during the day, nobody is getting the most out of the trip. Similarly, I understand why the Office of Global Education is required to prohibit or warn against a variety of things — food, personal safety, not leaving the hotel — because even though we sign away our right to hold them responsible, the university doesn’t want anything bad to happen to its students. This would be a public relations disaster. But, if anything, the intense emphasis instills a sense of detachment; we have to catch ourselves before we eat some fruit, for example. This paranoia prevents fully engaging with the location and creates a strict break between the rhetoric of full immersion and the much more finicky way concerns play into those ideals.

After this most recent trip, my professor said something that stuck with me, something along the lines of acknowledging what we learned and understood, but also accepting how much we missed or didn’t understand. Rather than trying to encapsulate everything, this is the approach we should be taking. Any attempts to gain positively from the experience of a class trip are dangerously undercut by the ways in which our current class trip culture engages in some of the most negative aspects of tourism: voluntourism, slumming, using non-white kids or sadhus as props in photos.

The university actively promotes this culture for image and advertising purposes. It promotes the more exciting, fun or supposedly adventurous aspects — those elements make me most queasy — as part of the promotional campaign for the university, as a way to demonstrate how this sets the trip, and the school, apart from other experiences. The trips shouldn’t be about this and it might come down to how students have to resist this frivolous presentation of these academic experiences, especially at a time when we need to prove that our university is more than that. Our university isn’t just a captioned, crowd-sourced promotion, or travel, or multicultural group of friends smiling: it’s a real place. Unfortunately, that doesn’t show through when using the hashtag #iknowwhatyoudidlastjanuary.