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USF in London

Program Leader: Benjamin Scott Young

Spend your summer in one of the most dynamic and diverse cities in the world. The USF in London program is a four-week, six-credit immersion based in the heart of the city during the Summer B term — an opportunity to live, learn, and lead in a global metropolis where history, creativity, and innovation meet.

Join Dr. Benjamin Scott Young's Honors course, London Walk: Generous Leadership and the Science of Experience — a course that blends cultural exploration with cutting-edge contemporary research into how we perceive, learn, and make meaning. The city itself will be your classroom as you explore its parks, theaters, museums, markets, and neighborhoods and reflect on how place, story, and embodiment shape human experience and the possibilities for a generous leadership.

London’s iconic cultural landscape provides the backdrop for this transformative experience. Program excursions include, for example, the British Museum, Tate Modern, Regent’s Park, and a live performance at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. You’ll also enjoy a traditional British tea on a River Thames cruise, and receive a two-day London Pass granting access to more than 90 landmarks — including the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hampton Court Palace, and Windsor Castle.

Beyond these guided visits, you’ll have the freedom to explore independently and in small groups. Students will reside in central London, surrounded by vibrant cafés, gardens, and historic landmarks — perfect for spontaneous adventures with friends and quiet reflection on your own unfolding experiences.

Whether you are drawn to art or architecture, history or health, neuroscience or psychology, the lived ethics of global citizenship, or simply fascinated by the nature of experience, British culture, travel, and/or the possibilities of a flourishing future, USF in London offers a rare opportunity to bring these interests together — regardless of your major or professional path. Here, intellectual exploration meets lived experience, and academic learning moves with the rhythms of the city.

Step into London’s unfolding story — and discover how to navigate, interpret, and flourish within a world that is always becoming. Honors students from any discipline who wish to immerse themselves in the rich history and diverse tapestry of global culture that defines London will find in this program not just a summer abroad, but a transformative journey of learning, leadership, and lasting connection.

Coursework

Summer B | June 29 - Aug. 7, 2026

In addition to enrolling in one of two possible sections of the Honors course (IDH 4950 or IDH 4200), participating students will also take one other course of their choice taught by a USF faculty member. For a full list of these courses, .

Honors Course - Cultivating the Good Life in London  

IDH 4200 Geographical Perspectives

What does it mean to live well—and how do our answers deepen when we dwell elsewhere?

This course invites students to investigate the good life through immersive, place-based inquiry in London, a city whose density, walkability, and layered histories make the shaping of experience unusually visible. Rather than treating the city as an object of study from a distance, the course approaches London as a setting in which experience itself becomes available for attention and cultivation. Through walking explorations, skillful observation, field discussion, and travel writing, students examine how place, movement, and social context, shape what seems desirable, worthwhile, or sustaining across the long arc of a life.

Living and learning in London brings ordinarily unnoticed habits, assumptions, and orientations into view. Moving daily through a city where ancient institutions, everyday routines, and rapid cultural change coexist at street level, students learn to attend carefully to how experience shifts as familiar expectations soften and reconfigure. This attentiveness allows participants to examine how meaning, value, and well-being are formed through the interplay of memory and anticipation, habitual patterns of action and interpretation, and the felt texture of embodied experience.

The course draws on philosophy (especially phenomenology and ethics), the neuroscience of experience, and the psychology of well-being, while remaining grounded in first-person inquiry. Emphasis is placed on learning how to read and craft experience—developing discernment, agency, and responsiveness—so that reflection and action remain attuned to the textures and demands of lived life.

Rather than approaching the good life as an abstract ideal or inherited doctrine, the course treats it as a living question that arises within experience and must be interpreted in context. London’s neighborhoods, public spaces, museums, markets, parks, and transit systems provide concrete sites for observing how narratives, routines, social norms, and material environments shape judgment and agency, and how reflective attention can expand the capacity to respond thoughtfully to unfamiliar situations.

Learning in this course unfolds primarily through walking and shared attention on excursion in the field. London becomes a living studio in which museums, gardens, markets, and performance spaces function as sites for sustained experiential inquiry. Students engage the city through carefully structured encounters—listening to the city’s soundscape during guided walks in Regent’s Park, practicing dialogues of perception with modern art at the Tate, and attending to the enduring ethical and dramatic questions staged at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre along the Thames. These encounters are not treated as isolated cultural experiences, but as occasions for examining how meaning arises through movement, sensory attunement, historical context, and collective interpretation.

Students also take an active role in shaping the course’s shared itinerary. Working in small groups, they design and lead a facilitated walking excursion to a destination of their choosing within the city, applying the interpretive practices and forms of attentiveness developed throughout the course. Through these embodied and collaborative inquiries, walking together becomes a practice of discernment: a way of integrating perception, cultural understanding, and reflective judgment in motion. London thus serves not simply as a setting, but as a sustained field of practice in learning how to notice, interpret, and respond thoughtfully with others amid the uncertainty and complexity that characterize lived experience.

By dwelling elsewhere in London, students cultivate practices of attention that support thoughtful, meaningful living. Encountering unfamiliar social patterns, densely shared public spaces, and historically layered environments through everyday movement, the course provides tools for engaging experience with care and clarity, preparing participants to navigate complexity, difference, and change in ways that sustain a life they would, all things considered, choose to live.

Honors Course – London Walk: Generous Leadership and the Science of Experience

IDH 4950 Capstone

What does it mean to lead well in a city that never stops moving?

In London Walk, the city itself becomes your classroom. Through guided walks, museum visits, shared reflection, and collaborative projects, students explore how meaning, judgment, and leadership take shape through movement, attention, and relationship. Learning unfolds on foot—across parks, neighborhoods, galleries, and historic streets—where London’s rhythms, contrasts, and surprises invite a deeper way of noticing and engaging the world.

This course approaches leadership not as control or command, but as presence, care, and responsiveness. Students learn to lead by paying attention: to place, to others, and to the subtle dynamics that shape shared experience in complex environments. London provides an ideal setting for this work—a city where history, culture, and everyday life intersect at street level.

In a rare opportunity for a small-group, sit-down discussion with a former head of state, students will engage in conversation about leadership in the contemporary world with Henry McLeish, former First Minister of Scotland. Drawing on his experience in public service, governance, and political life, this session invites students into a thoughtful, open discussion of leadership as it is lived and practiced amid real-world complexity, uncertainty, and change.

Walking together becomes a practice of discernment. Students explore the city through soundwalks in Regent’s Park, encounters with modern art at the Tate, performances at Shakespeare’s Globe, and everyday movement through markets, neighborhoods, and public spaces. Along the way, they reflect on how perception, habit, emotion, and imagination shape how we act with others.

Students also take an active role in shaping the course. Working in small groups, they design and lead a facilitated walking experience in London, practicing shared leadership, interpretation, and decision-making in real time.

By the end of the course, students will have developed:

• Greater attentiveness to place, people, and context
• Practical skills for leading thoughtfully amid uncertainty
• A deeper understanding of how experience shapes judgment and action
• Confidence navigating complexity with care, creativity, and clarity

London Walk invites students not just to study leadership, but to practice it—step by step—within one of the world’s most dynamic cities.

Program Dates

Summer B 2026 | June 30 - July 30, 2026

• Applications Open: First week of fall 2025 with rolling admission based on IDH course availability.
• Applications Close: New deadline – Jan. 30, 2026
• Course dates: June 29 - Aug. 7, 2026
• Travel dates: June 30 - July 30, 2026

Program Cost

• 2026 Program Cost: $6,177.00 + USF tuition and fees

Accessibility

This program involves significant walking in urban terrain. More broadly, England has many unevenly paved sidewalks and hills. 

"I highly recommend being a part of the USF London for a hands-on experience! Our Honors professor promoted interacting with nature, museums, and a variety of fun activities such as attending a Shakespeare play in The Globe Theatre." – Mridula Singh

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MORE ABOUT THE TRIP

Want to learn more? Listen as Honors students Cynthia Nelson and Jordon Myrick share details about the USF in London study abroad program.

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