May Term

Ready to broaden your horizons? The optional four-week courses offered during May Term let you try something outside of your usual curriculum. These are intensive, hands-on courses and many of them you won't find anywhere else.

Why May Term?

May Term is a way to get outside of yourself and try something new. You can enroll in a fascinating class outside of your usual curriculum or join one of our outstanding Study Abroad trips.

May Term complements the courses offered during Spring and Fall terms but gives you an avenue to satisfy your natural curiosity. We believe this helps you grow into a confident, well-rounded, endlessly inquisitive global citizen. 

In other words, May Term is where Redlands students are made.

Professors and students rehearse for a performance of a modernized rendition of Professors and students rehearse for a performance of a modernized rendition of "Hamlet" during a May Term theatre course.

Where can I go?

Austria. Ethiopia. Japan. May Term students do a lot of traveling, from the bustling cities of Europe to remote tropical islands. The one thing the trips have in common: The curriculum is unique, they emphasis hands-on learning and they're unforgettable. 

About 15 Study Abroad courses are offered each May Term. Some travel around the U.S. but most are international. These credit-granting classes usually have 14–15 students who work and study together.

Two students explore a reef off the shore of Palau, a tiny tropical island in Micronesia.

What can I study?

The curriculum for each May Term course is unique and focuses on hands-on experience. For example, students in our Race on Campus course spent their May Term organizing a conference that focused on issues of race on university campuses. Another May Term course takes students to Peru where they hike the forests studying the effect of drought on the trees.

Other May Term courses take students on a road trip around the American South visiting sites of important events in the Civil Rights Movement, to Ethiopia to study wildlife and to Japan to study that country's history and culture.

Many courses are unique to Redlands. Our Reading Comics in Culture class looks at the hidden meaning of comic books and what they tell us about our society. Our Internet Afterlife class looks at how technology affects our own mortality and how it may one day bring us immortality.

Students speak during the Race on Campus conference.Hundreds of students from all over Southern California gathered at University of Redlands for a conference about race on university campuses. The conference was organized by the May Term Race on Campus class.

Experience of a lifetime

Many students say their May Term classes changed the course of their lives. These are some of their stories.