The Backpack Blog

Several weeks ago, I went to visit a friend at Warren Wilson College, located in Ashville, North Carolina. During the week I was there, I was amazed by the dedication the student body had to preserving the natural environment on and around the campus. Many college students at other colleges around the United States claim to be environmentally conscious, but as soon as being eco-friendly gets in the way of comfort or ease of living, those morals go out the window. The students at Warren Wilson didn’t just claim to care, though – they really acted upon their environmental concerns. There is a group of students at the college, for instance, that bathes just to preserve water. Much of the food stocked by the dining hall is cultivated and supplied by students on the campus’s fully-student run farm. Nearly all of the other jobs on campus, too, are performed by students, rather than outsourced to third party companies The paths through campus, including its miles of beautiful hiking trails, are kept absolutely spotless, so as to preserve the beauty of the college. All of these things go to show Warren Wilson’s devotion to environment and community, two things which also happen to be two cornerstones of Backpack’s mission.

I was also impressed by the student body’s dedication to helping the community around them. “Service” is one of Warren Wilson’s thee core values, along with “academics” (obvious, for a college), and “work” (talked about in more depth above). Students engage in lots of community service, both locally and nationally. It saddened me greatly, however, to learn that Warren Wilson was facing financial difficulties and might be driven out of business in the next few years. It seemed unfair that such a world-conscious establishment should be threatened. Becoming part of the symbiotic community Backpack provides would be an excellent way of extending Warren Wilson students’ tendency to help others from the national to international level while dealing with some of the financial difficulties Warren Wilson and some of its students are facing.

Warren Wilson students are truly citizens of the world. They care deeply about creating a sense of community, and they have an incredible study abroad program. The adventurous spirit and love of tight-knit communities make Warren Wilson students perfect prospective members of the Backpack network, where people around the world can help each other get what they want for less money.

When I was abroad in Vietnam a year ago, my host brother was accepted into the HameenAmmattikorkeakoulu University of Applied Sciences (don't worry about it, it's called HAMK for short). In the past year, I have stayed in contact with him and done some of my own research of HAMK. The crown jewel of HAMK is its phenomenal education program, which is recognized as one of the premier educational tracks in Finland, a country said to have "an education system that provides a model for the rest of the world." As HAMK's site notes, such reputable sources as the Economist Intelligence, Harvard Business Review, and Newsweek have commented on Finland's exemplary standards in innovation and education.

HAMK's elite post-graduate teacher training program includes a strong experiential component, and HAMK says itself on its site that "our aim is to export our services abroad." As an elite and ever-growing community of international travelers, HAMK's large teachers-in-training department is an ideal demographic to join the Backpack community for several reasons. First, joining backpack would make traveling abroad vastly more affordable by offsetting travel costs with earning made being a Backpack Carrier. Second, Finland is part of Scandinavia, a hotspot for quality handmade products that those in other countries, namely the ones the teachers studying at HAMK travel to, will no doubt enjoy having access to (Finnish Salmiakki and Swiss watches, anybody?)

Another notable aspect of HAMK is the huge international student body it hosts. Any student studying abroad should be informed about backpack, as it makes visiting their home countries much more cost-feasible, as well as gives them the opportunity to help their home country's community by using the power of the Backpack network.

Foreign Trade University (FTU) is among Vietnam’s best schools. It is based in Vietnam’s capital and number one tourist destination, Hanoi. This alone provides a great opportunity for FTU students to take advantage of Backpack’s network, because, as a city with a ton of traffic from tourists, both incoming and outgoing, Hanoi is a very easy place to quickly receive items via Backpack’s network.

FTU students focus on logistics, marketing contracts overseas, and export/import activities. Generally, the international trade topics the students learn about are experienced in a purely theoretical fashion, but Backpack creates a cheap and easy way to engage in international commerce or trading. Whether it means transporting items to sell, receiving items to buy, or transporting important documents, using Backpack would enable FTU students to elevate their studies from theory to practice.

A notable aspect of FTU student life is the frequency with which students take part in exchange programs. The exchange programs take place in Europe or other Asian countries, often in economically undeveloped areas. As the product market in Vietnam is not as accessible as in the US (no one-stop shops like Amazon or Target), FTU students travelling to remote areas in other countries could become extremely popular as Backpack carriers – people back in Hanoi or other parts of Vietnam would likely clamor for items they could not obtain locally. Backpack therefore creates the opportunities both for FTU’s students studying abroad to help out their community members by salvaging hard-to-come-by items and to offset some of their travel fees, an obstacle keeping some FTU students from taking semesters abroad in the first place.

With Backpack, international commerce – for business dealings or simply for recreation – and overseas travel become a breeze. Hanoi’s Foreign Trade University students are just one of the many demographics that could benefit from becoming Backpackers.

As you’ve likely realized by now, you’re on Backpack’s site, and so you probably know Backpack’s general purpose. It helps people obtain products and other resources from overseas by making them part of a community – a worldwide community that can bring each other what they need or want, regardless of where in the world it is produced. Anyone can join the Backpack community and anyone can become a cog in its global machine of cooperation, but one demographic it may be especially helpful is college students, who may benefit greatly from study materials and products to aid with student life that cannot be acquired locally. My name is Dustin Whitehouse, and, starting this week, I’m going to be writing for Backpackbang about uses of Backpack that would be especially pertinent to specific colleges. Some of the colleges I write about will be American, and many will be from elsewhere in the world, to show that no matter where someone lives, Backpack can be an extremely useful learning tool, as well as a good way to displace much of the expense when travelling internationally. In writing about each college, I will try to identify its unique programs or qualities and tell you how Backpack could be used to further them.

It is probably not a surprise that for my first entry ever, I want to write about my own school, The College of Wooster. The college is located in a small town in Ohio. While most of the students here love living in a small town rural setting, it is not exactly a melting pot or an environment where we can come across unique cultural items. Basically, unless Walmart stocks it, we can’t buy it. This fact makes Backpack’s ability to bring literally any obtainable item in the world to us even more of a treat. For example, let’s say there is a Vietnamese student at COW (as those in the know call the College) who wants to incorporate her own country’s heritage into her room’s decoration screen by hanging up some traditional Vietnamese silk prints. The silk prints are certainly not going to be available at Walmart, and even ordering on Amazon can not insure quality or authenticity in the product. The student could, however, use Backpack’s network of trusted carriers to obtain a good quality and guaranteed authentic silk print from their home town that has actually been looked at and assessed by a fellow consumer. Because the relationship between a Backpack user and his carrier is more personal than that between a buyer and a company, the person looking for a silk screen could even have the carrier take photos with his phone and could ask the carrier to answer specific questions about the product choices before choosing which silk screen she wanted. In just a few days, she would receive a guaranteed high quality product from across the world that she got to pick and choose from the other options available, and she could do all of this without ever leaving Wooster.

Wooster’s flagship program and possibly its most distinct feature is its independent study program, which requires every Senior at the school to complete an in-depth study and evaluation over the course of the school year. Many students find their study would be aided if the student were given to opportunity to conduct research abroad, and a select few students each year receive grants from the school to do just that, but many students cannot afford to travel abroad in order to collect crucial data for their studies. This limits both the range of topics which can be studied and the diversity that can be included in the studies’ subject samples for the students who cannot travel. Backpack can help this situation. By registering as carriers and joining Backpack’s growing network, students can cut hundreds of dollars, if not more, off their travel expenses. A Chinese Major at COW, for instance, may benefit greatly from actually travelling to China to conduct first-hand research for his Independent Study. This would be extremely unlikely without Backpack, but, if he signed up as a Backpack carrier a few weeks in advance of his trip, he could carry products from the US to China, make money off each item, and, by doing so, pay for some if not all of his travel fees. Carrying one Macbook Air alone would go $400 towards eliminating his expenses, and carrying multiple items could pay for his flight and more! Backpack makes international travel much more affordable and, while this is useful for everyone, it could be especially useful for COW students conducting Independent Studies.

Another aspect of Independent Study that Backpack could help with is obtaining rare documents not available in the US. Let’s say, for instance, that a student conducting an Independent Study wanted to view the original and undigitized version of a rare Moroccan primary source. The student could arrange, without leaving her room, for someone to obtain the physical document by hand at the source and delivered to her in the small town of Wooster, Ohio. With Backpack, the world is your oyster. Anything can be obtained from around the world, and international travel becomes cost-feasible. College of Wooster students are just one of the many demographics that could benefit from becoming Backpackers.