April 11, 2002
Staff profile: World traveler turns wanderlust into vocation
Betsy Bridwell grew up with a father who loved traveling. Nothing pleased him more than getting out maps and planning trips. Aside from a few forays into Mexico and Canada, however, the elder Bridwell has never left the United States. His daughter, on the other hand, has circled the globe more than once, transcending her Ohio childhood to become a citizen of the world. And for the last 12 years, she’s been helping UW students who’d like to follow in her footsteps.
Bridwell is director of career services/alumni relations for the Jackson School of International Studies. “I try to help students translate their love of international studies and desire to travel into concrete job possibilities,” she says. “A lot of them don’t have a clue how to get started.”
It’s easy for Bridwell to relate to the students; 30 years ago she was very much like them. Then she discovered Semester at Sea, a program that has students living on an ocean liner that is a floating campus. They study various countries, then visit them. She spent part of her junior year on the ship and loved it.
“When I graduated with a sociology and psychology degree, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Bridwell says. “I thought I’d have to become a social worker. Then I got a chance to be a resident adviser on Semester at Sea.”
The RA position, she explains, was much like working in a residence hall, and she enjoyed it so much that her career path suddenly became clear. She wanted to work in student services. A master’s degree at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma followed, and she has worked in student services pretty much ever since — except, that is, for the times she took breaks to travel again.
The first of those forays was when Bridwell was working for Evergreen State College. The college, she explains, offered a yearlong, interdisciplinary program called Russia/USSR that included study of the history, literature and culture of Russia, followed by a trip to that country for a language-study program. She wanted to take a leave of absence to attend but was turned down, so she quit.
“That was a huge thing for me,” Bridwell says. “I went through all this, ‘Oh my god I can’t do this, I’ll never find work again.’ But I was really at the point where I was ready to make a change, so I just said ‘Okay, I’m going to take the plunge.'”
The brief dip turned out to be a real immersion when Bridwell inherited some money from her grandfather, which allowed her to take a few more years off during which she got involved with the Peace Quilt Project. This was in the days of citizen diplomacy, she explains, and she and some other people had the idea to make homemade quilts and send them to the then-Soviet Union to be given away. Bridwell coordinated that project for a few years, and in the process made two trips to the Soviet Union.
Then came an irresistible opportunity. Eighteen years after her original trip, Bridwell was offered the job of director of student life on Semester at Sea. “Basically, I was hiring people to be resident advisers as I had been before, and together we planned all the non-academic activities for students on the ship,” she says.
She came home in 1990, thinking that maybe it was time to settle down for a while. That’s when she was hired by the Jackson School. At first, Bridwell says, the job was designed to be a combination academic adviser and career services position. “But the advising took so much time that I wasn’t able to do much with career services.”
So when the school was granted an extra half-time position in 1994, they created one full-time advising position and one half-time in career services and alumni relations. Bridwell once again gave up some security to take the half-time job, but it was the one that matched her interests. In fact, she notes, that’s probably the reason she has worked at the UW longer than anywhere else.
“I’ve found a great niche for myself because it meshes all my interests,” she says. “I’ve been able to combine the student services I like with the international component. I also have my fingers in the community because I have to keep in touch with potential employers and internships, and it’s a great environment to work in.”
Not that it has cured her of wanderlust. In the last couple of years Bridwell has traveled to Bali and Tibet. The former trip found her among a group of about a dozen living for 10 days in a village where there were no other westerners. The group studied the native arts, including music, dance and wood carving.
“There was no running water or flush toilet,” Bridwell says of the village. “I know a lot of people would never want to travel that way but it’s interesting to me because you get much more of a flavor of the life of the people.”
Her trip to Tibet included a bus trip from Kathmandu, Nepal at the end of the monsoon season. It turned out part of the road had been washed out, so she and her fellow travelers had to get out and walk for two miles before another bus could pick them up. It was, Bridwell says, the most rugged trip she has taken, but one of the most spectacular.
It also turned out to be memorable because she left the United States on Sept. 8. Traveling in an extremely remote area, the only news she had of Sept. 11 for several days came over a short wave radio that one of her fellow travelers had.
Sept. 11 won’t stop a seasoned traveler like Bridwell from taking trips. She’s already thinking about visiting places she’s missed, like Australia and New Zealand, and revisiting some places she only just touched on, like Latin America. She also looks forward to retiring early and getting involved in hands-on activities where her help is needed. That, she says, comes out of her life of traveling.
“I think that when you travel and do the kinds of things I’ve done it makes you more open minded about the world,” Bridwell says. “I feel like it’s made me realize how insulated so many Americans are, how unaware we are of how American policy impacts lives in these countries. My travels have made me more concerned about social- and economic-justice issues. I want to contribute in some way toward positive change in that area.”
