Programs

The University of Exeter is one of the leading universities in the United Kingdom and has maintained a close academic partnership with USF for more than twenty-five years, reflecting a shared commitment to international education and scholarly collaboration. As part of a university culture shaped by centuries of intellectual inquiry and public debate, students encounter traditions of learning that continue to lead contemporary academic life globally.

Students in the program enroll as exchange students at the University of Exeter and experience daily life as UK “uni” students while living in campus housing alongside fellow USF Honors participants. Studying and living within the Exeter community allows students to engage fully with the rhythms of British university life while positioning them within a wider intellectual and cultural landscape that extends across Britain and Europe.

During the semester, students take two or three classes — known as “modules” in the UK — that can count toward major requirements and other USF graduation credits.

To learn more about the university, visit the University of Exeter website.

For a quick introduction, check out these videos: 

• University of Exeter, 2030
• A Student's Guide to Life at the University of Exeter
• International Alumni reflect on their experience at the University of Exeter
• International Student Experience at the University of Exeter
• This is the University of Exeter

Student Housing

Honors students on the program will live in student housing on the University of Exeter Streatham campus. Each student will have their own private room and adjoining private bathroom. Private rooms are part of a shared suite, which includes a shared kitchen for preparing meals.

Student Life

You will discover a rich array of opportunities within the University of Exeter, the city of Exeter, and the wider southwest of the United Kingdom. The Exeter Students’ Guild is a key feature of student life at the University of Exeter. From academics to sports to outdoor adventures, these student Clubs and Societies give students a fast-track connection to a diverse array of experiences and friendships. To find out more about the student experience, follow this link to  life at the University of Exeter.

Through immersive travel, interdisciplinary study, and collaborative inquiry, the Honors research courses explore how personal experience, culture, environment intersect to shape personal and professional life in a rapidly evolving world. In addition to enrolling in classes at the University of Exeter, students enroll in either one or two Honors seminars.

The core course taken by all students in the program, The Art of Experience: Cultivating Meaningful Lives, Communities, and Professional Purpose Abroad, is designed for students from any academic background or professional ambition. Using life in Exeter and travel across the United Kingdom as a living laboratory, and drawing on ideas from the philosophy and science of human experience, the course explores how attention, the body, place, culture, and environment shape meaningful experience and community life, with the aim of cultivating discernment, confidence, and leadership capacities.

The second, optional seminar, Embodied Health: Professional Formation in Contemporary Medicine, is designed especially for students interested in the health professions. Building on the ideas and experiences introduced in The Art of Experience, this course draws on research from the philosophy of medicine and the health humanities to examine how health care professionals navigate complex, embodied human situations within rapidly evolving social, technological, and globally connected environments.

The Art of Experience: Cultivating Meaningful Lives, Communities, and Professional Purpose Abroad

A course exploring how attention, place, culture, and life abroad shape meaningful human experience.

Studying abroad at a pivotal stage in life, when true independence opens opportunities for self-cultivation and the freedom to explore, provides a rare window for expanding the horizon of possible experience — for deepening discernment through a widening of perception and skillful action in the present, and for elevating and refining your vision for the future.

Participating in the Semester in England program offers not only the opportunity to live in England for a semester, but also a structured and protected space to step back, reflect on your personal and professional trajectory, and refine that path through firsthand experience of how it is shaped by the qualities of attention, culture, habit, and environment. In this course, your experiences during the semester abroad become a living laboratory for exploring how the philosophy and science of human experience can inform your life projects, skills, and perceptive discernment. Moreover, the course provides opportunities to put these insights into practice through explorations across the United Kingdom, with student-led field excursions serving as studios for cultivating the art of inviting and leading meaningful experience.

Drawing on ideas from phenomenology (the philosophy of experience), cognitive science, theoretical biology, literature, the visual and musical arts, and geography, we explore how experience takes shape through the orientation of life projects and stories, the rhythms of practice and culture, and the textures of perception in lived environments. These theoretical perspectives help reveal how the qualities of our attention, curiosities, and the stories we tell interact with the people we encounter and travel with, and the places we navigate that form the setting for the cultivation of meaningful experience. We come to feel and understand firsthand how the patterned rhythms of everyday life sustain individuals and communities across time, how the subtle perceptual textures of place — its landscapes, conversations, and atmospheres — give experience its lasting significance, and how these are woven into the stories we carry forward, shaping the embodied lives we lead.

England provides a remarkable setting for this exploration. Through visits to historic cities, landscapes, and cultural sites, you will encounter traditions and histories that have shaped both the region and the wider world. These encounters invite not only curiosity and reflection — on how places orient attention, how communities move through shared rhythms of practice, and how the textures of landscape and culture shape the perceptive feel of experience — but also the opportunity to actively shape your own experience, and to contribute to the experiences of others.

Working in small teams, participants plan and guide excursions to places of cultural, historical, and environmental significance. These explorations deepen engagement with the places encountered while offering the opportunity to practice deploying the ideas and techniques developed in class for crafting meaningful shared experiences. In doing so, we cultivate both resilience and adaptability while developing practices of reflective discernment that support wise choices, effective action, and outcomes conducive to flourishing lives.

Our aim is not only to cultivate curiosity and wonder, or to develop practices of wandering through diverse landscapes of ideas, practices, and perceptions, or to deepen a sense of belonging with one another, the places we visit, and the experiences we create together. Rather, we also aim explore how these insights can be carried forward into your evolving personal and emerging professional lives, preparing you for diverse circumstances, unanticipated challenges, and emerging opportunities in the years to come.

These capacities, grounded in cultivated attention, collaborative leadership, and skillful exploration within community, support the development of discernment, independence, and confidence in navigating unfamiliar environments in a complex world. Together, they contribute to personal development and professional success long after this adventure ends and the next chapter of life begins, leaving you not only with memories but skills that last a lifetime.

This course is a living tradition. Each year, students design and lead excursions across England and develop independent creative research projects. These journeys and works become part of the evolving repertoire and collective knowledge of the Honors Semester in England program and its alumni community — forming a network of generational connection grounded in shared experience and sustained inquiry. In this way, participants contribute to something that extends beyond a single semester: a growing body of insight, practice, and memory that connects past, present, and future students through a common pursuit of meaningful experience. As each cohort adds to and draws from this living archive, the program becomes not only a course of study, but a community of ongoing connection and resource — one that continues to support personal and professional growth long after the semester ends.

Embodied Health: Professional Formation in Contemporary Medicine

Preparing for careers in the health professions involves more than strong academic preparation and scientific knowledge. It requires the gradual development of the interpretive capacities that allow practitioners to understand complex human situations in which biology, culture, environment, and lived experience intersect in the realities of health, illness, and care. This course approaches professional formation through the study of embodiment, examining how human experience, perception, and meaning shape the practice of medicine and the health professions. Embodied health understands health not simply as a biological state, but as a lived, relational, and cultivated experience — how health is felt, enacted, and sustained through the body in its environment.

Contemporary medicine is undergoing rapid technological transformation. Artificial intelligence systems increasingly assist clinicians in synthesizing medical research, generating diagnostic hypotheses, and organizing clinical information. These tools expand access to knowledge while reshaping the conditions under which medical understanding develops. Preparing for careers in the health professions therefore requires cultivating discernment: the ability to interpret medical knowledge responsibly, to evaluate technological tools critically, to perceive what matters within complex human situations, and to remain attentive to the embodied realities of patients and practitioners whose experiences form the basis of health practices.

Living and studying abroad in England provides an especially rich setting for this inquiry. Encountering new cultural environments invites reflection on how bodies, habits, environments, technologies, and meanings shape experience. Throughout the semester, you will examine these questions through reflective engagement with embodied experience itself.

The course is organized around four interconnected pillars that together support embodied professional formation.

Global dialogue. Students participate in the Global Classroom for Health Humanities and Geographies, an international virtual seminar linking students with partners at institutions including the University of Exeter, Duke University School of Medicine, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of South Florida. Through interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars in medicine, anthropology, geography, and the humanities, students explore how experiences of health, illness, and care are shaped across cultural and environmental contexts.

Seminar inquiry. Seminar discussions introduce foundational ideas from the philosophy of science and medicine, ethics, and health humanities. In conversation with faculty from the University of Exeter’s Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, we examine how medical knowledge develops, how technological change reshapes contemporary health care, and how experiences of health are shaped by the forms scientific theories take, the institutions they sustain, and the lived realities of those who inhabit these systems of care. Through these discussions, students consider how responsible professional judgment develops within complex and evolving medical environments.

The study of experience. The course also builds directly on ideas explored in The Art of Experience, which all students in the Semester in England program participate in. That course examines how perception, environment, and embodied experience shape human life. Here, those insights are extended into reflection on embodied professional formation in contexts of health. In this way, students begin to examine how their own developing orientations, habits of attention, and interpretive frameworks may shape the kind of practitioners they become.

Embodied field experience. Field excursions across England invite students to attend carefully to the relationship between body, perception, and environment. Walking through landscapes, cities, and historical spaces becomes an opportunity to observe how unique environments organize perception, shape patterns of attention and action, and influence how human experience becomes meaningful within particular cultural settings. These experiences provide embodied examples of how our own stories, practices, and perceptions are formed, how they shape our evolving self-concept, and how they form the foundation of professional development and competent health care practice.

By the end of the semester, you will have gained a deeper understanding of how embodiment, culture, environment, and technology intersect in contemporary health care. More importantly, you will have begun to reflect on the formation of your own professional self-concept — how your perceptions, practices, and commitments might be robustly organized around the central end of medicine: the patient’s experience of health — and how the discernment required to pursue that end must be continually cultivated within evolving epistemic, technological, and cultural environments.

This course invites students to think carefully about what it means to become a practitioner whose understanding of health and care remains grounded in the realities of embodied human experience. For students considering careers in medicine and related fields, the course offers a unique opportunity to substantially advance their embodied professional formation in contexts of health while studying in — and exploring — the United Kingdom.

Each week in May and June, students on the program join Dr. Benjamin Young on an excursion to explore England. These trips are woven into the Honors coursework and often involve a meal together. The list below provides a sample of possible locations. 

• Royal Albert Memorial Museum
• Home-cooked meal at Dr. Young’s apartment & film screening
• Exeter Cathedral & Library and Archive
• Walk Along the River Exe
• Redcoat City Tours
• Exeter Guild Hall
• Darts Farm
• Dartmoor National Park
• Exmouth & Jurassic Coast Walk 1
• Powderham Castle
• Walk from Branscombe to Beer
• City of Bath
• St. Ives
• Literary Walk at Lynton and Exmoor
• Salisbury Cathedral & Magna Carta
• Stonehenge
• The Eden Project
• Destinations in London

Genshaft-Greenbaum Travel Scholarship

• $7,000 (All students accepted to the Honors Semester in England program are also awarded this scholarship)
• This award is not subject to limitations based on prior participation in a study abroad program
• Award amount may shift based upon a student's total financial aid award package 

Program Cost for Spring 2027

• TBD
• Spring 2026 program cost:  $14,618.00 + USF tuition and fees for your Honors courses
• In-State Tuition: All students on the program, regardless of residency status, will pay in-state tuition price for both university of University of Exeter modules and USF Honors courses

Included in Program Cost

• Coursework at the University of Exeter (up to 45 Exeter hours – about 9 USF credit hours)
• Housing for the program's duration
• USF on-site faculty members
• 24/7 emergency support
• Program related site-visits

Not Included in Program Cost

• USF tuition for Honors courses
• Passport / visa fees
• Personal expenses
• Meals
• International airfare
• Transportation not included as part of the itinerary
• 16-25 Railcard
• Student activity, lab, or ID fees assessed by the University of Exeter 
• Supplies

Other Sources of Funding

Please note that scholarship deadlines may vary and students may need to commit to a program before they know if they have received a scholarship.

• Gilman Scholarship: Students eligible for a Pell Grant are also encouraged to apply for the Gilman Scholarship, which can award up to $5,000 in funding towards a credit-bearing study abroad program.
• University of Minnesota's Study Abroad Scholarship Search database
• Careers & Colleges Scholarship Search
• The Center for Global Education
• College Board Scholarship Search
• BeGlobalii Community
• GoAbroad.com
• Institute of International Education Study Abroad Funding
• International Education Financial Aid
• International Scholarships
• International Student & Study Abroad Scholarship Search

• Wander: A collection of walks in the southwest of Exeter, by Sierra Shellabarger 
• Pilgrimage Podcast, by Katy Pfeiffer
• Semester in England 2020 video, by Ana Rooney