Where There Be Dragons

I guarantee that there will be times when traveling with Dragons where you will feel out of your comfort zone. I’m not talking dangerous situations, I’m talking adapting to challenging situations that haven't been presented to you yet. Embrace this opportunity, don’t shy away from it. I believe people learn the most from situations that involve pushing yourself slightly more than you're used to. Be sure to welcome these experiences.

One of the many beauties of Dragons is that the itineraries are subject to change given the availability of opportunities on course. For example, if the Dalai Lama is near a Dragons group, they may try and see him as opposed to doing another scheduled activity. The amount of flexibility within each program really separates Dragons from the rest. In terms of what an average day/week may look like, it really may be a multitude of things. Or we could wake up in a homestay, help our families with daily activities, meet with our groups for ISPs, and then have a very open afternoon. It all depends.

I have never been that good at picking up foreign languages. Whether it’s in a classroom or abroad, I always felt I was one step behind everybody else. However the language lessons on Dragons courses are so unbelievably amazing. It’s focused on oral pronunciation, so it’s actually useful for when we speak to locals or our homestay families. Dragons also provides students with a respectable amount of words and phrases to focus on, so our skills are developed but the students aren’t overwhelmed with the amount presented to them. I also realized I picked it up much faster than I realized because when you are living in homes that speak the language, you get much better at the language much faster. I looked forward to every language lesson we had!

Lots! Feedback and student input are a largely emphasized among the Dragons community, so students had lots of influence when it came to molding the itinerary. Also, throughout the course of the program, there were roles assigned to each student, and one of the roles was a leader position. Leaders were in charge of various things, but one of them was partially designing the day's itinerary.

I think that beyond specific stories from return students about something they experienced on a program, I love hearing about what students do with their lives upon completion of a Dragons course.

I have always been intrigued by our course in Indonesia. All of our programs travel to places radically different than what most of our students have ever experienced, but this is one that has always stood out to me. Perhaps it is the fact that I lived in Colorado where water is scarce, and many of the communities we spent time with in Indonesia lead lives that are so intimately tied to the ocean.

There are a number of things that make Dragons unique, but what I feel most proud of is our community of instructors. Dragons hires instructors who are true experts in the countries in which they run programs, and they are passionate about sharing that with students.

Every season, each instructor team carefully crafts an itinerary that follows a certain theme or emphasis but is also totally unique. Rather than the office drafting up an itinerary, contracting out to providers in country, and handing all these plans over to instructors, we allow instructors to use their own local knowledge, contacts, and resources to design the itinerary.

They are bringing students to communities where they themselves have lived and worked. This allows students access to places they might otherwise not be able to go to or even know existed. It’s a fair amount of work but the result is truly transformative for students.