Where in the World is Andrew Wendelborn?

I suppose a video game is to blame. In sixth grade, my buddy Jim and I would stay in the middle school library during recess sometimes to play the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” crime-solving and geography-teaching computer game, which preceded the popular early-1990s PBS game show of the same name.

As a child growing up in rural Wisconsin – where diversity was most evident in the different breeds of dairy cows and variety of cheeses – my idea at the time of distant and exotic travel was visiting Aunt Charlotte in the big metropolis of Milwaukee. So, from a young age, I was fascinated by foreign places and cultures as presented by that video game and also my social studies textbooks.

My first international experience wouldn’t happen until I was 21 years old when I traveled on an airplane for the first time. Without mobile phones or readily available internet access back then, I arrived in London and had four weeks to make my way to Rome for my return flight without previously arranged transportation to do so. I don’t know how I ever convinced my parents to allow me to do that! With trust in Divine Providence, I successfully navigated bus, ferry and train schedules and flew home from Rome after weeks of visiting famed sites I had seen previously only in books or on TV.

As a young adult, I traveled mostly domestically with the exception of a trip with my mother to Santiago, Chile, to visit longtime family friends. It was via an invitation to chaperone Notre Dame MBA students to China in spring 2015 that I caught the travel bug, which I’ve been unable to rid myself of since. During my time serving graduate business students (2014-2019), it was a great privilege to have the opportunity to take students to places such as China (2015 and 2018), Brazil (2016), Chile (2017 and 2018) and Puerto Rico (2018). The highlight, for sure, was being able to create a meaningful 10-day immersion in 2019 for MBA and MSA students in South Africa – the first time taking Mendoza graduate students to that country.

Although I no longer travel internationally in my current role in the Office of Undergraduate Studies, I have been able to continue global exploration during my own vacations. Recent personal travels include Vorder Bollhagen, the small village in Germany from where in 1857 my branch of the Wendelborn family emigrated; a short visit to Rome and Vatican City with my mother; and London for the central weekend surrounding the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II followed by a 36-hour visit to witness events of the Queen’s funeral three months later.

Of the 26 nations I’ve visited to date, the most memorable has been Slovakia where I visited the family of the foreign exchange student, Robin, whom I hosted during his senior year of high school here in Indiana. Slovakia is a beautiful country with friendly people and delicious food (perhaps a mix of German and Hungarian cuisine). 

The surprise of the weeklong visit was my induction as an honorary Goral. Shared with such esteemed personages as presidents, prime ministers and other men and women of great deed (including Robin’s paternal grandfather, the only inductee in his family), my first-level induction grants me honorary membership of the Goral highlanders, a people indigenous to the mountains of northern Slovakia and southern Poland. I received a special hat, certificate, beverage, spanking with a traditional shepherd’s ax and the right to be addressed as “Mister Goral.”

For me, travel is not only a way to exercise my brain, but a means for me to experience firsthand a greater portion of the human condition and the wonders of the planet our species inhabits. Good as it was, I think back on my childhood and the lack of diverse experiences I had then, and I am grateful for the incredible growth in both mind and heart that travel has given me.

Indeed, in The Innocents Abroad, my favorite American author and humorist, Mark Twain, writes, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Up next for me? Greece! Where in the world do you want to go?

Andy Wendelborn
Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Studies