Study Abroad

Bind your heart to a foreign land

We may look like a quiet, suburban campus in central Pennsylvania, but teeming inside are six continents and 24 time zones.

At Messiah, your college experience expands beyond Grantham and reaches around the globe. You study in one of more than 40 different countries, strengthening the groundwork you’ve been laying at Messiah all along — how to hear differing perspectives and how to weave new insights into a vision that is your own.

• Learn Mandarin Chinese in Dalian, China
• Explore the arts in Sydney, Australia
• Tutor schoolchildren in Thailand

Messiah College’s study abroad program is recognized as one of the best in the nation. We are ranked 15th, by the Institute for International Education, among undergraduate institutions sending students abroad.* Last year, more than 400 students earned academic credit studying abroad.

Messiah’s cross-cultural courses, semester-long international studies, and academic service-learning experiences will help you deepen your knowledge of the world and its people while earning college credit. Our programs will allow you to:

• Enhance your major
• Strengthen language skills
• Explore unfamiliar locations
• Live with a host family
• Complete an internship in an international setting

For many students, studying abroad is a life-changing experience. “It was a time of intense personal growth in the midst of situations I never would have imagined,” says one student, who spent a semester abroad. “For the first time in my life, I felt like the bumper rails were taken off.”

We feel so strongly about the educational benefit that we offer many of our programs at the same, or comparable, cost as a semester at our Grantham campus.

Or, if you want to stay closer to home, our North American programs include AuSable Institute for Environmental Studies, Los Angeles Film Studies Center, Oregon Extension, and the Philadelphia Campus.

However you choose to experience it, when you return home from studying abroad, you realize that you see the world very differently. Because you’ve been there, the broader world feels more real. Events that once seemed remote now feel close, and you realize that as a global citizen how you respond to them matters.