by Jake Crouse and Macy Petty
EXPLORING THE THREE SELVES
In the summer of 2022, a group of 12 members from Wofford’s faculty and administration convened to evaluate and rethink Interim.
“We asked, ‘What do we do well with Interim? What do people love about Interim? What do we need to change to help Interim continue to be a valuable experience?’” says Dr. Karen Goodchild, Chapman Family Professor of Humanities in art history and academic director of Interim.
The group looked at all the courses that were offered over the five previous Januarys, and Goodchild says they fell into three basic categories. Those categories — Self in Community, Professional Self and Self Enrichment — are the foundation of the Three Selves Model, which Wofford faculty voted to endorse in 2022 and was implemented beginning in 2025.
Goodchild says the goal of the model is not to force students to choose one class option over another, but to broaden their view of what is possible to accomplish in January over their four years.
“Maybe your first year, you stay on campus and build community doing a Self Enrichment Interim. If you can get finances together for the next year, perhaps you travel abroad with a Self in Community Interim led by faculty or with one of our partner programs,” says Goodchild. “Then maybe as a junior, you think, ‘What would it look like to work in the field I’m interested in?’ and you find a Professional Self Interim internship or Learning Work opportunity. These are all possibilities.”
THE THREE SELVES, DEFINED
Self in Community courses involve extended experience with or in communities beyond Wofford's campus. These courses provide a space for developing improved knowledge and skills for engagement with diverse others.
Travel Interim experiences make up a large part of the Self in Community offerings. That’s where Dr. Britt Newman, associate professor of Spanish, hopes to lend a hand.
Newman is the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning fellow for travelstudy pedagogy, a topic he has been invested in since shortly after joining Wofford’s faculty in 2012.
“I’m in the faculty development role, consulting with them about ideas they have,” Newman says. “A faculty member may come to me and say, ‘I want to do a course on soccer in the UK. Here’s the idea as far as I’ve got it.’ I’ll ask questions, and we’ll go from there to see where there may be other questions to address or opportunities for engaging with local communities.”
Newman was selected in 2022 to travel to Nepal along with Dr. Kimberly Hall, associate professor of English, for a workshop on how to develop robust study abroad experiences for college students. He and Hall used those lessons to develop an Interim experience back to Nepal, and now Newman wants to help create strong travel Interim opportunities for others.
“I’m really invested in this question of how do we make studying abroad during a short-term experience such as Interim as impactful as it can be?” he says.
Self in Community also extends to course offerings that don’t feature a travel component but seek to understand how humans build community, how they understand and depict their community and how humans are a part of the larger ecological community.
Professional Self courses create a space for students to explore and advance their professional aspirations or development.
In the spring of 2022, Goodchild and the Interim committee interviewed alumni, faculty, staff and students to see what they valued about Interim and what they would suggest changing.
“The number one thing students wanted was more professional opportunities,” she says.
Goodchild says the Interim committee and the Career Center have worked to expand internship and Learning Work opportunities and to lengthen the timeline for students to secure a position. This year, they began offering Terrier INTERIMships, immersive alumni- and trustee-supported internship experiences in various industries. They’ve also worked to build more professional opportunities locally for students who cannot afford to move elsewhere for an internship.
“Say you're a sophomore, and you know you want an internship, but maybe you have no personal connections. How do you get that internship?” Goodchild says. “We try to get them tracked to the Career Center earlier so they can learn about networking skills. We’re also collecting data from places students have successfully interned. Then we can ask the company if they would be willing to work with a Wofford student again.”
Self Enrichment courses create a space for students to explore a topic in depth. In these courses, students may challenge themselves with work in topics or disciplines that push the boundaries of traditional academic courses.
Many on-campus offerings during Interim fall in the Self Enrichment category.
Goodchild says the expansive list of classes in this category — topics this year include coffee, baseball, magic, furniture design, creative writing and character development in “Breaking Bad” — represent student interest in pursuing passions and skills. Even if unrelated to their career tracks, these can serve them well later in life.
“If you don’t know anything about knitting or woodworking, but you spend a month immersing yourself in it, you may discover that you can make things — and that you enjoy the process. Then, when you’re 40 or 60, you’ll have that habit of mind: the confidence to dive deeply into something new, to learn a skill from the ground up and be a lifelong learner. I think that is one of the keys to happiness for many people,” says Goodchild.
PROFESSIONAL SELF
CLINICAL INTERNSHIPS
The reputation of the Clinical Internships Interim course has spread.
“I have students who interview on Wofford Scholars Day, and they specifically mention the Clinical Internships experience,” says Dr. Michael Cato ’17, assistant professor of biology. “It’s good for Wofford’s image. It’s good for relationships with local hospitals. It’s a great program.”
For the past 30 years, students who meet the approval requirements of the course get the opportunity to shadow physicians, surgeons and medical specialists, many of whom are Wofford graduates who benefited from the program when they were students.
Dr. Grant Warren ’95, an obstetriciangynecologist at Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System, took the Clinical Internships course as a student in 1994. When he began working as a medical practitioner in Spartanburg 22 years ago, he immediately connected with Wofford, giving students the opportunity to shadow him. The experience came full circle for Warren when Sydnie Mick ’17, who shadowed him in this course, began working alongside him last year as an obstetrician-gynecologist at SRHS.
“I enjoyed the internships so much as a student. I knew I wanted to go into medicine, but I wasn’t sure what type. It was so eye-opening for me as a student and as someone who did not yet have that in-depth exposure to what physicians did,” Warren says.
Dr. G.R. Davis, professor emeritus of biology, has helped oversee the program since 2019. He maintains the database of professionals who are available to shadow each spring. He then coordinates student schedules and preferences with related shadowing opportunities. Davis is always adding to the extensive list of specialties, including recently adding a radiation oncologist and a sports medicine doctor to the team.
“Each student gets to shadow eight to 10 different specialists,” says Davis, “and that’s great, because often students are not at a point at which they can discern what field they want to go into. What they discover many times is that they didn’t know about one. They may say, ‘Rheumatology? I’ve never heard of this. This is great!’’’
Wofford students do more than watch. They also share informed conversations with practitioners during shadowing days. This year, Davis assigned two books for them to read as well: one on the life story of a doctor and one from a selection of works about Big Pharma and health insurance. The students are asked to write journal entries after each day at a site, and Davis says it’s clear that they are having conversations about complex industry topics as well as the day-to-day activities of medical practice.
“Many are interested in learning about work-life balance, and they’re asking their hosts about this,” he says. “They want to have a profession where they can help people, where they can use their minds and their medical skills to improve the lives of others, but they want to be able to have a family life outside of their work.”
Eliza Guthrie ’26, a biology major on the pre-PA track from Greenville, S.C., took the Clinical Internships Interim in 2025.
In her rotation she shadowed Dr. Carolyn Gardner Schultz ’95, a pediatrician at Eastside Pediatrics in Greenville. The two reconnected at Homecoming in the fall and laid the foundation for a Learning Work Interim this January that has allowed Guthrie to dive deep.
“Shadowing the pediatricians, neonatologists and OB/GYNs last year confirmed my desire to explore these types of careers and allowed me to get a better feel of what life as a physician assistant in women’s health or pediatrics would look like,” Guthrie says.
As Interim has been reconsidered over the past few years, there have been discussions about the Clinical Internships Interim expanding to better serve other healthcare tracks at Wofford, like nursing and physical therapy. Giving students who have diverse interests more opportunities to this key experience is the goal.
“Students can go into medical school interviews and say, ‘I’ve shadowed 10 physicians in 10 fields. This is what I did. These are the fields I like.’ That makes a really good impression,” Cato says. “The quality and breadth of the experience that students get at Wofford is so much better than if someone just shadowed one specialty for 100 hours. We want that for all of our students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare, regardless of their interests.”
SELF IN COMMUNITY
FIRE ECOLOGY
One chilly Tuesday morning in January, students in the Fire Ecology Interim course loaded into a van and made the four-hour round trip to the Andrew Pickens Ranger District of Sumter National Forest, parking just a few thousand feet from the border of Georgia.
When they arrived, they huddled with representatives from the U.S. National Forest Service, the South Carolina Forestry Commission and The Nature Conservatory for the formal safety briefing ahead of the prescribed burn about to take place. Patches of test fires flickered nearby as students asked questions of Ryan Green, assistant fire management officer of the Andrew Pickens Ranger District, and Helen Mohr, Upstate Firewise and prevention field coordinator for the South Carolina Forestry Commission, about the burn plan outline they were handed.
Dr. Cissy Fowler, who began teaching Fire Ecology in 2010, says field experiences are the core of the course, and this prescribed burn was a particularly powerful learning moment.
“We can talk about them in the classroom and in the field with no flames, but to be able to see the flames in person — feeling the heat, smelling the smoke, hearing the crackling, seeing litter get consumed — you learn better when you have the full sensory experience of fire,” she says.
When the burn began around midday, the students climbed a small ridge and watched as Green took a drip torch to the pine straw that blanketed the land. In the distance, shots could be heard from incendiary flare launchers, which allow managers to propel flames deep into land that might be harder to reach.
“Watching the controlled burn was honestly one of my favorite experiences in this class,” says Chanson Bullard ’26, a biology and psychology double major from Sumter, S.C. “I like that we got to see how everything was conducted from beginning to nearly the end. I had no idea years of precise planning went into such an event.”
The Fire Ecology Interim asks students to expand their horizons beyond just one or two communities of people. Instead, they investigate how many different types of people — federal and state land managers, nongovernmental organizations, private landowners, Indigenous people and more — relate to fire and how non-human species and ecological communities are affected by it, as well.
“There are many ways of thinking about fire. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s generative and creative, sometimes it’s destructive,” Fowler says. “Lots of land managers in our region want to put more fire on the ground. If they can control it, putting more fire on the ground at the right time and conditions is a very good and generative and positive thing.”
Preston Price ’26, an environmental studies major from Surfside Beach, S.C., says he decided to take the course to get outside and see different ecosystems. He likes to fish and hike — including trips through forests he’s explored during this Interim — and now can clearly connect the work of land managers to his recreation. “I am incredibly glad that there are people who put so much effort into preserving and maintaining these places so that people like me can get out there and enjoy it,” he says.
Students put themselves in the shoes of these land managers by the end of the class. In their final assignment, they picked a specific, real unit of land and came up with an ecological restoration plan for it. It could be a national forest, a state park or their great-uncle’s hunting land. The students asked themselves what would this look like in 100 years? How will I preserve it, with or without fire?
Fowler says she would love for students in the class to come out of this experience interested in training to become wildland firefighters and prescribed burners, certifications which she has held. If not, she still sees immense benefits from the lessons and trips.
“Even if they go into psychology, finance, law or all the things Wofford students tend to pursue, I think it benefits the world for our doctors, lawyers, social workers and teachers to know what’s happening in our public lands, to know the people who are managing them, to understand some aspects of what they’re doing,” she says.
SELF ENRICHMENT
PULP THEATRE
![Students rehearse the 2026 Pulp Theatre production of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] [again]”.](wofford.edu/images/about/news/wofford-today/2026/spring/interim-2026/pulp-theatre.jpg)
Jack Tope ’26 believes the Pulp Theatre experience during Interim teaches students what they are able to accomplish.
“You recognize your capability separate from your professors,” says Tope, a theatre and government double major from Atlanta. “You get to build and grow skills that you might not have used before.” Tope is the student director of this year’s Interim production, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] [again].”
In the Pulp Theatre course, Wofford students are the actors, directors and designers. They work together to complete a production in just three weeks and perform it during the final weekend of Interim. Though the show is cast in the fall and actors begin learning their lines during winter break, no other preparation is done before students return to campus for Interim. Theatre professors lend suggestions only if students ask for guidance.
Mark Ferguson ’94, chair of the theatre department and T.R. Garrison Professor of Humanities, says this gives students a chance to learn new disciplines like set and costume design and explore their characters in depth.
“Theatre is an excellent tool for creating empathy by putting yourself radically and profoundly in the shoes of someone else,” he says. “Nothing is more important than increasing our ability for empathy.”
The course is also designed to challenge students. “We will not step in to save them,” says Ferguson. “Failure is an option.”
“The students have to create everything,” says Colleen Ballance, professor of theatre, who teaches the course alongside Ferguson. “The crew goes through all the decision-making processes for the design. Everyone involved has as big a role to play as an actor. It’s a laboratory to demonstrate mastery of what you’ve learned.”
Ballance says this is a particularly good opportunity for students majoring in subjects outside of theatre — who might not have a chance to participate in a mainstage show during the regular season — to explore their artistic capabilities. “I love it when people come from outside the department,” she says.
Tope, who played the title role in the main stage production of “Macbeth” this fall, believes that “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) [revised] [again]” is particularly conducive to a fast turnaround. The play follows three actors who are trying to perform all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in about 100 minutes. Tope says he first saw the play at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern, where he has watched and participated in productions since he was a child, and it opened his eyes to a different style of theatre.
“This play relies on people,” he says. “You can strip it down, and it can be just as good without all the bells and whistles.”
Though directing his peers sometimes felt daunting, Tope says it inspired him to really do his homework.
“You doubt yourself and ask, ‘Why should they listen to me?’ But I feel that I have done the work and earned their trust,” he says. “It’s less about having a grand vision and more of a collaborative process.”
Cole Geyer ’26, a theatre major from Columbia, S.C., says putting together a show in such a short amount of time is exhilarating.
“I love going from learning lines to having a show up on its feet — a show that people want to see — in just three weeks,” he says. “It teaches you to be a lot more independent and trust where the vison goes.”
Ferguson says that he and Ballance have removed themselves from the production process more and more over the 17 years that they have overseen the Pulp Theatre Interim — a course he calls “one of the essential pieces of theatre at Wofford.”
“We have found that the further away we are, the better it is,” he says. “The quality of the show is obviously still important, but it’s the student experience that is at the forefront of Pulp Theatre.”