Matthew Barbour, a British university student sponsored by the Cornell Club of London for summer session courses this year, holds a copy of Sin, the satirical magazine he co-founded. Charles Harrington/University Photography
Matthew Barbour admits that when he first saw a flier on the campus of the Univer sity of Bristol advertising summer study at Cornell he was unfamiliar with the U.S. university. But after spending six weeks as a student here this summer, the Englishman says he won't be forgetting it anytime soon.
Barbour, a politics student who will enter his third and final year at Bristol in the fall, took two courses in Cornell's six-week summer session (June 24-Aug. 6) one in Near Eastern studies, the other in astronomy with all tuition and living expenses paid by the Cornell Club of London. The club is sponsored and funded by Cornell alumni living in Great Britain.
Barbour, 21, is the fourth British summer student to be sponsored by the London alumni club in as many years; the previous students hailed from Warwick, Cambridge and Oxford universities. (Other Cornell alumni clubs, including those in Los Ange les and Pittsburgh, also have sponsored summer students at Cornell.)
Though Barbour was booked on the wrong plane and temporarily lost his lug gage en route to Ithaca, he adjusted quickly after his arrival on June 21. That may be because globe-trotting is so familiar (and familial): His father, a native of South Africa, and his British-born mother lived in several countries before moving to Harare, Zimbabwe, where Matthew was born. The family moved to Cheltenham, England, when he was six.
In recent years Barbour has made frequent trips back to Africa to visit relatives in Zimbabwe, to teach English and chemistry in Tanzania and even to lead canoe safaris on the Zambezi River in Zambia.
At Cornell he took two courses, Essential Ideas in Relativity and Cosmology and Introduction to Modern History of the Middle East and Africa, 1800 Present.
The courses reflect Barbour's international interests and, you might say, his lofty ambitions. Last year the aspiring journalist started up a satirical magazine, Sin, out of his Bristol flat with a friend. Aimed at college students and funded entirely by advertising, the glossy maga zine has featured interviews with performer Boy George and filmmaker David Puttnam, among other British artists, and has won several national awards, includ ing the Guardian Student Magazine of the Year Award. Barbour's ultimate goal is to land a job writing for The Economist.
This summer, when not attending two and a half hours of class each day or con ducting library research for his senior thesis on the Fijian constitutional crisis, Barbour took sailing lessons on Cayuga Lake. He will cap the six weeks at Cornell by travel ing down the East Coast of the United States, stopping off in Washington, D.C., to conduct more political research, and spending a month in the Yucatán Peninsula.
"It's hard to imagine Cornell under two feet of snow," he observed on a sultry day in late July, "because right now Cornell being anything other than tropically hu mid seems nigh-on impossible."
When asked to name the biggest different between Cornell and Bristol universi ties, his reply came easily: "It's bizarre coming to a university with no bars on campus but I suppose you learn to get by!"