ORGANIZATION

The USC Madrid program is offered during the Spring semester and its base is the Instituto Internacional, a historic building in central Madrid.

ACADEMICS

• This program is designed for providing linguistic and cultural immersion to USC students and is focused on experiential learning. Courses have been selected and designed to include a strong component of relevant cultural experiences. Daytrips, weekend excursions, homestays, and other experiences play an important role towards this goal.
  
• In the Instituto Internacional, our students take USC courses, mostly Spanish courses. These courses are main part of this experiential immersion program designed to help USC students make rapid progress with their Spanish majors and minors. They can take up to 16 units of Spanish.
  
• Non-Spanish majors and minors are also welcome to the program. They are required to enroll in 8 USC units in Spanish and take the rest of their courses for their majors or minors at Universidad Carlos III.
  
  

HOUSING

Students are placed with Spanish families in central Madrid. We consider the homestay experience as one of the program pillars. Within the families our students grow their Spanish level and acquire deeper cultural understanding of the Spanish society.

INTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

• The program offers two weekend tours, two one-day excursions, and at least one weekly cultural activity in Madrid. All of these “out of the classroom” activities are not considered “extracurricular activities” but substantial part of the program courses curriculum and are fully covered by USC tuition.
  
• Activities in Madrid are diverse like visiting the Real Madrid football stadium, attending to musical concerts, Spanish movies at the theater, cooking workshop, tapas tasting, visiting museums, eating regional and Latin-American foods, visits to newsrooms or radio stations…
  
• In the out of Madrid educational tours the experience usually includes exploring city highlights like the Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Alhambra palace in Granada, the University of Salamanca, old synagogues in Toledo, Cordoba mosque, royal palaces in Sevilla and Segovia, gothic cathedrals in Toledo and Sevilla, and so on… We visit olive oil traditional industry, handicrafts workshops, attend to flamenco musical shows, try regional cuisine, and explore rural villages and natural parks.
  
• The theater class attends to 6-8 ongoing theater plays in Madrid and, after the performance, students frequently have the chance to meet for an informal chatting with directors, actors, producers, or playwrights. At the end of the semester all the students in the class perform a short Spanish play.
  
• The Spanish language and culture courses include weekly cultural experiences outside the classroom. It can be fieldtrips to museums, artistic workshops, community gardens, restaurants... Or they could meet with Spanish artists, performers, or musicians. We connect the syllabus sequence with the sociocultural calendar in Spain and the program cultural activities calendar and course discussion topics are selected considering their relevance and opportunity.
  
  

CONTACT IN SPAIN:

Loli Martínez Moya
E-mail: martinez@uscspain.com