At the ori­en­ta­tion to France on Tues­day, Lau­ren East­er­ling or Tim Cahill said that the next sched­uled manda­tory IPE Study Abroad ori­en­ta­tion for stu­dents would be Wednes­day in Archi­tec­ture 147.  Because it sounded like the stu­dents and direc­tors already had some com­mon knowl­edge that might have been picked up at the Study Abroad ori­en­ta­tion, I went to that ori­en­ta­tion yes­ter­day.  I got there a moment late, so missed the intro­duc­tion of the two peo­ple run­ning it. Lau­ren East­er­ling was one. The other must have been Michael Renes, as Lau­ren called him Mike.  As I went in, he handed me a book­let, the Stu­dent Study Abroad Pock­et­book. Early on, he asked stu­dents where they were going.  Sev­eral raised their hands for each area he named: Latin Amer­ica, Africa, Ocea­nia, Asia, Europe, and maybe one other area. Lau­ren and Mike then used a slick com­puter slide show to go over many of the points in the book­let.  They spiced up the show with sto­ries from their own expe­ri­ence and from the expe­ri­ences of stu­dents who had gone on ear­lier pro­grams.  A few times they men­tioned research results that backed up what they were say­ing.  I enjoyed the ori­en­ta­tion and made lots of notes. A lot of it sounded like com­mon sense that would be easy to for­get.  The book­let looks use­ful, too. All in all, it seemed like a good map for get­ting where you are going and get­ting good results out of going.