Why Professors Should Choose to Work with ARAMFO?

I would like to take the opportunity to give an enthusiastic recommendation to ARAMFO for anyone considering working with them.  I’ve been acquainted with them for a year and half now, organized a fantastic trip to Egypt in the summer of 2013 and I am currently organizing a trip to Morocco for the summer of 2014.  I have worked closely with ARAMFO in this time period and found them to be incredibly responsive not only to my questions but to the kinds of things I wanted my students see on the trip.

For starters, I have had complete academic freedom to construct the course I want to teach.  I am a scholar of social movements so my Egypt course, entitled “Protest, Emergent Democracy, and the Role of Islam in Egypt.”  My initial concerns about academic freedom were immediately laid to rest by ARAMFO’s team, who worked with me to suggest resources that might enhance the trip, and who talked about other courses that ARAMFO had sponsored in the past.

Not only was I free to create the course I wanted, ARAMFO worked hard to get the people I wanted to speak to my students.  I asked to be able to interact with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, protestors, students, opposition groups, the military, journalists, clerics, government officials, and members of the U.S. embassy.  ARAMFO delivered on all accounts, setting up conferences, lectures, and dinners that provided my students with incredible access to folks who were key players in the revolution and subsequent government.  Our students spent significant time with other Egyptian students, something they wrote more about than seeing the amazing Egyptian antiquity sights. 

ARAMFO also handled all of the administrative details of the trips- from collecting payments, buying airline tickets, scheduling an itinerary, booking hotels, arranging translation, covering security, making sure we were well fed and had plenty of drinking water on our trips, hiring local experts to talk about the sites- everything you could think of was handled and arranged by them. All I needed to do was recruit students and plan a course, and make requests for the kinds of folks we wanted to interface with.  In short, I handled the academic end and they took care of all the rest.  Not only did they take care of the rest, they did so with top notch services.  Our hotels were amazing, our spaces for seminars opulent, the buses we traveled on clean and comfortable- they didn’t just deliver, the delivered with class. 

Their work with me demonstrated their commitment to their mission to bridge understanding between students across the world. This was reflected in an incredibly high quality experience for my students- indeed one that was life transforming for them, and for me.  I give them my unreserved endorsement. 

Dr. Daniel M. Cress
Professor of Sociology
Director, Honors Program
Western State Colorado University