Located about 250 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a comprehensive research institution that serves more than 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In 2016, the institution’s president expressed a renewed commitment to comprehensive campus internationalization. In 2019, UT Austin developed Texas Global, a centralized unit that coordinates global initiatives across campus. Through efforts to map global engagement and identify regions and partners of strategic interest, UT Austin has developed opportunities for student internships abroad, seed grants for faculty to pursue research with partners abroad, and virtual exchange and other curricular programming for students on the UT Austin campus.
On the first day of his new job as vice president for research at UT Austin in 2016, Dan Jaffe, PhD, met with his counterpart at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [UNAM]). They discussed which researchers at their respective institutions were collaborating, and Jaffe was unable to pinpoint with whom his faculty were working.
“At that point, we had really not put together the machinery for understanding even what our faculty were up to,” says Jaffe, who served as interim executive vice president and provost until mid-July. “And now, by gathering those threads together and building a strategy around certain people and target countries, we’re able to be much more effective with our [approach to internationalization].”
That same year, senior leadership at UT Austin announced a renewed commitment to global engagement and convened a task force charged with looking at models to strengthen internationalization at the large, highly decentralized research institution with approximately 80 academic departments across 18 schools and colleges. The task force identified the need to bring on a leader dedicated to championing international education.
Sonia Feigenbaum, PhD, senior vice provost for global engagement, was appointed UT Austin’s first chief international officer in 2018. “It became abundantly clear that there had been lots of activity but no mapping and no communication between the various parts of the university,” she says.
Since Feigenbaum came on board, comprehensive campus internationalization at UT Austin has involved taking a strategic and coordinated approach to global engagement. She wanted to bring together the various areas that contribute to the university’s global mission.
The result was the creation of Texas Global, which advances UT Austin’s global mission and includes a centralized division composed of Education Abroad, the English Language Center, Global Engagement and Strategy, Global Programs and Innovation, Global Risk and Safety, International Student and Scholar Services, and Special Initiatives.
“We’ve created programs that respond to the various aspects of internationalization where we’re advancing the mission of the university with research, with partnerships, with student and faculty mobility, and with global engagement on campus that is also informed by our visiting scholars, and a host of events and activities that take place on campus,” Feigenbaum says.
“All of these various units are contributing to the efforts of what is happening throughout the campus,” she adds. “Texas Global is the nucleus, and there are various spokes across the institution that allow us to advance the mission of internationalization.”
Texas Global used a mapping exercise to identify countries where the institution has numerous alumni or a large number of institutional, corporate, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) partnerships, Feigenbaum says. Working with other offices on campus such as the Business Contracts Office, the Office of Sponsored Projects, Texas Admissions, and Enrollment Management and Student Success, Texas Global developed a database that identifies faculty’s research and other international activities. Texas Global also has hired a dedicated director of global alumni relations to enhance engagement in key regions of the world.
In 2019, Texas Global created Global Career Launch, an initiative that leverages faculty connections at universities, research centers, companies, and nonprofit organizations around the world. Students can take part in partially funded internships and research abroad under the guidance of a UT professor and an international partner. This initiative advances internationalization, supports student mobility, and encourages faculty collaborations abroad, Feigenbaum says. Thirty students and five faculty members participated in the inaugural internships with partners in Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Mexico, and Thailand.
“Global Career Launch is designed to launch students into experiential learning opportunities that are career focused,” says Heather Thompson, director of education abroad.
Faculty receive seed grant funds, and students are awarded scholarships of up to $4,000 to help offset the cost of the internships, she says. The internship model varies depending on the program. In some cases, faculty travel with students to help them get settled, and then the students work with an in-country supervisor. In other cases, the professor remains abroad with the students the entire time. For summer 2021, Texas Global sent three cohorts of students abroad, and two other cohorts completed their internships virtually.
Kinesiology professor Hirofumi Tanaka, PhD, took students to Bangkok, Thailand, to complete a six-week internship in the exercise physiology laboratory at Chulalongkorn University. The students tested the physical fitness and performance of transgender adults and compared them with cisgender males and females. The internship offered an opportunity to inform policy as international bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee, have not yet issued final guidance on whether or not transgender athletes should be allowed to compete in women’s sporting events, Tanaka says.
As part of UT Austin’s efforts to renew its focus on global engagement, former president Gregory Fenves, PhD, established the International Board of Advisors (IBA) in 2017. The group, composed of individuals representing multiple countries with connections to UT Austin, makes recommendations on how the university can expand its global network and enhance its presence around the world. David Wolcott, PhD, assistant vice provost for global engagement, says that the IBA was part of a much broader strategy to engage alumni in comprehensive internationalization efforts.
One of the board’s initial priorities was to increase experiential learning for UT students. This led to the development of a signature program, the President’s Award for Global Learning. The program provides seed funding for interdisciplinary, credit-bearing projects conducted by up to four students and three faculty members. “It brings together interdisciplinary teams of faculty and students to work on these projects abroad,” Wolcott says. “And it is a very rigorous proposal process where faculty teams must work with international partners to submit proposals that identify a topic that can be addressed in a global context.”
Since 2018, the program has supported 17 projects in 13 countries. The teams have included 48 undergraduate students, 19 graduate students, and 45 faculty members. For summer 2021, programs to Denmark, Jamaica, Jordan, and Mexico were allowed to run after a rigorous risk and safety approval process.
“This award [supports] faculty who go out and help deepen and strengthen our partnerships and find new ways to collaborate and really push the development of inquiry and leadership skills for our students,” says UT Austin President Jay C. Hartzell, PhD.
Tim Mercer, MD, director of the global health program at Dell Medical School, was the lead faculty on a team that received the award in 2018. He took a group of students to Puebla, Mexico, to conduct a community health needs assessment. “It really helped galvanize our partnership with our partners there in Mexico,” he says. “Working together on this project really laid the groundwork for our global health partnership going forward, so it was tremendously catalytic in that sense.”
“I was able to learn a lot of skills that have followed me into the clinic,” says Veronica Remmert, a current medical student who participated in the program as an undergraduate at UT Austin. “The project has greatly impacted the way that I view patient encounters and how I seek to be as a physician.”
Another interdisciplinary program is Projects with Underserved Communities (PUC), which the university has run since 2009. The program consists of a three-course sequence that pairs social work and engineering students with NGOs abroad. In the fall, the students work with their NGO partner on a community needs assessment and examine the feasibility of different projects. They also fundraise to cover the cost of implementation. Over the course of the year, the teams design their projects in collaboration with the community and the NGO, says Kirsten Hagen, MA, program coordinator. The student teams also present their projects to a service learning advisory board composed of representatives from UT Austin and industry leaders in fields such as engineering, social work, international education, and regional planning.
“There is a really strong focus on community-based development and building those partnerships with communities,” Hagen says. “Both the community and the students are contributing, and they’re both benefiting from the project.”
Nina Lobo, a civil engineering major who graduated from UT Austin in 2017, worked on a project constructing a learning and resource center for a community in south India. It allowed different religious groups in the community to come together in a neutral space to take classes, access the internet, and learn English. “We wanted them to have a kind of a space where they could get together on a more level playing field,” she says.
Since then, Lobo has helped create a PUC alumni group that advises current students on their projects. She says that participating in the program was a turning point in her engineering studies at UT Austin. “I think the whole time that I was at UT, I had been searching for a way to connect my degree back to social impact,” says Lobo, who now works at a nonprofit focused on equitable access to solar power. “And the PUC program was one of the first times that I found an ability to do that and really take ownership of a project from start to finish that really affected and reached people.”
Another effort to encourage faculty to conduct global research is a competitive $10,000 seed grant program. “Funded by Texas Global, the program was initiated in November 2020 and provides financial support to faculty in order to develop and strengthen new or existing partnerships with global universities or organizations,” Wolcott says.
The first round of funding went to nine proposals involving 11 UT Austin faculty who are collaborating with 10 partners in Australia, Chile, Egypt, France, Israel, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. Topics include urban housing in Egypt (in collaboration with the American University of Cairo) and the future of work in the age of the pandemic (with partners at the University of Cape Town). The second round of funding went to eight proposals involving 11 UT Austin faculty who are collaborating with nine partners in Ecuador, England, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, and South Korea. Topics include next-generation tropical ecology (in collaboration with Universidad San Francisco de Quito) and developing smart energy neighborhoods (with partners at Seoul National University).
Wolcott says that while the goal is to facilitate peer-to peer collaboration, UT Austin will also look at possible institutional partnerships if there are multiple faculty members working together.
Speech pathology professor Stephanie Grasso, PhD, received one of the seed grants for her research on bilingual individuals who present with primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia that affects speech and language. “There’s a growing body of evidence showing that speech language intervention coming from the field of speech language pathology can actually benefit specific communication skills and even slow the progression of the loss of communication abilities,” she says.
The challenge is that the majority of research in this area has focused on monolingual, English-speaking participants. “Very little is known about how bilingual speakers respond to these types of tailored intervention approaches,” Grasso says. Grasso is collaborating with researchers at the Sant Pau Biomedical Research Institute, a research consortium under the leadership of Sant Pau Hospital and affiliated with the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. The team is examining the effects of a tailored speech and language teletherapy program that is being administered to bilingual individuals who speak Spanish and Catalan.
The seed grant funds the work of a staff member at Sant Pau who is administering the therapy in Catalan, Grasso says. Wolcott says that one of the goals of the seed grant funding is to help faculty collect preliminary data that will allow them to apply for larger grants.
Texas Global oversees the Global Innovation Lab (GIL), which is focused on entrepreneurship and helping international companies launch products across the globe. “We train entrepreneurs on how to effectively assess target markets, build their company infrastructure, and plan commercialization strategies for global market entry. We also assist them with access to prospective customers, partners, and sources of capital,” says Glenn Robinson, MA, GIL assistant director.
The team primarily works with entrepreneurs who are testing their prototypes. In addition, Robinson and his colleagues have helped establish incubator networks in India and other countries and technology transfer processes that help entrepreneurs deal with issues such as intellectual property rights.
While their work has historically dealt with technology, they have started focusing more on social enterprise innovations in countries like Bhutan, Chile, and Colombia. As a result, GIL has launched an initiative focused on women entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
Robinson says that GIL builds awareness of UT Austin’s academic programs in order to recruit talented international students to the institution. In addition, GIL has taken a group of female students from UT Austin to meet their counterparts at the Indian Institutes of Technology to share their experiences as future entrepreneurs.
Prior to the pandemic, Texas Global launched several initiatives to engage international alumni, including hosting events abroad. But after March 2020, the unit had to rethink how it approached international alumni programming. “Rather than being able to bring live events to alumni, we switched to a virtual mode,” says Thuy Nguyen, MA, global strategies officer.
One of the initiatives Texas Global launched in partnership with Texas Exes, UT Austin’s nonprofit alumni association, was Texas Global Dialogues, which brought together panels of faculty and alumni to discuss the latest trends in certain fields and regions. The first event, held in August 2020, focused on journalism in Latin America. Subsequent dialogues revolved around sustainable energy and artificial intelligence.
Lisa Anaya, MA, global strategies officer, says that virtual programming has helped expand UT Austin’s international alumni outreach. “We’re making all of these inroads with alumni that we would have never been able to see or speak to before,” she says. In the future, the institution can use those connections to invite alumni to regional events.
President Hartzell says that an expanded physical presence in key locations is the next step in UT’s internationalization efforts.
UT Austin’s ongoing engagement with Mexico has led to the establishment of a physical presence there. In 2017, the institution opened its first Global Gateway office at UNAM in Mexico City, which will serve as a focal point for UT Austin’s activities in Mexico. While some efforts were delayed due to the pandemic, Texas Global is currently recruiting to fill the director position.
Jaffe says that the office is the first of several Global Gateways that UT Austin will open over the next few years—a direct result of the mapping and data collection exercises that Texas Global recently completed.
“Opening these Global Gateways within the major regions of the world is going to be really important to us so that our alumni, our faculty partners, and our corporate partners in those regions feel that we are a sustained presence,” Wolcott says.
Founded in 1972, Florida International University (FIU) is Miami’s first and only four-year public research university. A designated Hispanic-serving institution, FIU currently serves more than 58,000 undergraduate and graduate students, including 4,000 international students and more than 37,000 Hispanic students (66 percent of the student body). The university promotes global learning throughout the curriculum for all undergraduates, international research opportunities, and strong partnerships abroad. Building on the strategic efforts to internationalize over the past decade, the new Global Strategy 2025 will also help the university leverage its existing relationships around the world.
Ana Rojas, MS, never imagined she would become an expert on invasive species—particularly when those invaders are 3,000-pound mammals with an affinity for the water. When she was a graduate research assistant at FIU, Rojas traveled to the Magdalena basin in central Colombia to study the social and ecological impacts of hippos introduced by narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar.
“We call it ‘hippo heaven,’” says Rojas, who now works as a research development officer at FIU. “They have no natural predators, and they’re multiplying at an unprecedented rate. And the people [of the region] actually love them, even though they could become a really bad threat to the ecology of this system.”
Rojas started at FIU as an undergraduate and then stayed to earn a master’s degree in environmental studies. In addition to studying hippos, she did her master’s thesis on arapaima, a giant freshwater fish that lives in Colombia’s Amazon basin.
Her research abroad was about more than just academics. She was able to return to the country that she fled as a child. “I feel extremely privileged and very happy because I got to kind of reconnect with the country that I was born in,” she says.
Rojas is one of the many students who have benefitted from the university’s engagement around the world. Rojas credits the faculty she worked with at FIU for her interest in international work. She wants to pursue a doctorate eventually and possibly do conservation and restoration work in the United States and Latin America, including in Colombia. “I like making those connections and seeing how my two countries can work together,” she says.
One of the guests of honor and the keynote speaker at FIU’s groundbreaking in 1971 was U Thant, a Burmese diplomat who served as the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1961 to 1971. The ceremony was held at the base of an air traffic control tower, a remnant of the campus’s former use as an airport, which served as the university’s very first building. Today, the tower, situated in the center of campus, houses FIU’s Office of Veteran and Military Affairs. Current FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg, PhD, has commissioned a bust of Thant, who received FIU’s first honorary doctorate degree, to commemorate his presence at FIU’s groundbreaking.
When FIU first opened its doors to students in 1972, its founding goals were educating students, enacting service to the community, and fostering greater international understanding. “We have had the mission to foster greater international understanding since our founding, [and] we’re still delivering on that today,” says Birgitta Rausch-Montoto, MS, director of global strategy and faculty success.
Rosenberg, who began his career at FIU in 1976 as a political science professor, was involved in some of FIU’s earliest international endeavors, such as the establishment of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC) in 1979. He says that the center’s activities slowly shifted from language and area studies to a broader framework focused on global awareness.
“It provided us a more systematic framework for infusing more cosmopolitan thoughtfulness about what was going on in the world that went way beyond language and area studies,” Rosenberg says. “It was really remarkable how the faculty were willing to go beyond narrow boundaries and try to find ways to infuse that thinking in classes way beyond the social sciences.”
While FIU implemented some international initiatives throughout the 1980s, it was in the mid-2000s that the institution began reconsidering its approach to internationalization in preparation for its 2010 reaffirmation of accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, says Hilary Landorf, PhD, founding executive director of the Office of Global Learning Initiatives.
Reports from different units on campus showed that global learning was a focus for the institution, but it was not evident in what students were experiencing in the classroom. At the same time, the university was going through a branding exercise, and surveys showed that campus stakeholders found diversity to be FIU’s greatest strength. As a designated Hispanic-serving institution, the university graduates more Hispanic students than any other university in the continental United States.
“There was this disconnect. We weren’t capitalizing on our diversity of the classroom,” Landorf says. “You have students from all over the world and first-generation students who have Hispanic and other backgrounds. Their knowledge, their capabilities, their skills weren’t being used in the classroom. And that led to Global Learning for Global Citizenship as an initiative.”
Landorf, who is a leading scholar of international education and coauthor of Making Global Learning Universal, copublished by NAFSA and Stylus, says that the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative consolidated disparate efforts to internationalize FIU. “Global Learning for Global Citizenship really focused all of us faculty, staff, students, and administrators on obtaining and internalizing our three global learning outcomes: global awareness, global perspective, and global engagement,” she says.
FIU adopted global learning, defined as the process of diverse people collaboratively analyzing and addressing complex problems that transcend borders, as the focus of its quality enhancement plan for reaffirmation of accreditation. As of 2010, all incoming freshmen are required to take two global learning courses, one general education class, and one upper-division class in their major area. In 2011, the requirement was extended to incoming transfer students.
Rausch-Montoto says that the internationalization of the undergraduate curriculum was a “real game changer” in terms of wider efforts to internationalize the institution.
The university currently offers more than 250 global learning courses throughout the curriculum in all 72 of its undergraduate academic programs.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineering major or a business major; [global learning] is built into these courses,” Rausch-Montoto says.
To complement global learning in the curriculum, FIU offers a set of co-curricular programs that provide students with the opportunity to practice what they learn in the classroom. For instance, the Global Learning Medallion program engages students in high-impact practices, such as globally focused internships, fellowships, and research projects. The Millennium Fellowship program enables students to design and implement projects that address the Sustainable Development Goals in their local campuses and communities, and the Peace Corps Prep program prepares them to serve abroad. The Office of Global Learning Initiatives manages all of these programs, and they all have similar missions: to engage students with collaborative local and global problem-solving.
As of 2021, FIU trained more than 1,100 faculty to turn their classes into global learning courses. Hands-on interdisciplinary, interdepartmental workshops enable faculty to develop, revise, and lead courses, activities, and assessments that address FIU’s global learning outcomes of global awareness, perspective, and engagement. Faculty may receive a stipend as an incentive for attending these workshops and infusing global learning elements in their courses. All courses in global learning are reviewed every 3 years to ensure fidelity to the global learning elements is retained, Landorf says.
Alok Deoraj, PhD, is an environmental health science professor in the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work. Originally from India, he was immediately intrigued by the Global Learning for Global Citizenship initiative. “I was looking for a venue to share my experiences with students,” he says.
He integrated global learning elements into his general education public health class, Health Without Borders, which explores the interrelatedness of social, economic, demographic, and cultural factors affecting health. For instance, Deoraj says that during the pandemic, he broke up his students into groups by country and asked them to research how each country managed its COVID-19 response, looking at factors such as mask mandates and quarantine regulations. Then the groups made recommendations based on their country’s local situation.
“I have found that it’s very much eye opening for [students to see] that there is a similar problem on the other side of the world, but they have a different way to tackle it,” Deoraj says.
Beyond enhancing undergraduates’ studies, participation in global learning courses can help spark interest in international careers. When Camila Uzcategui, PhD, started as an undergraduate at FIU, she thought she wanted to be a doctor because it was a way she could have a positive impact on her community. But taking a global learning medical anthropology class broadened her perspective. “I think the global learning curriculum really allowed me to understand medicine from a different perspective,” she says.
Uzcategui ended up double majoring in physics and anthropology. “It really reshaped my whole career,” she says.
Instead of becoming a medical doctor, she recently earned a PhD from the University of Colorado-Boulder in material science and engineering. Her research focuses on biomaterials and increasing access to medical devices in underserved communities.
“When you’re seeing all these things occurring in the world, whether it’s a global pandemic [or other] things, FIU global learning gives us the tools to understand them and to be able to draw connections between them,” she says.
To uncover and visualize the breadth and depth of internationalization activities, FIU published its first biannual Global Programs Summary infographic, which summarized key metrics, quantified outcomes, and created awareness of its successes. During the review process, it became evident that multiple departments were duplicating processes and procedures because they were working in isolation. The same audit uncovered many hidden pockets of specialized internationalization expertise, such as more than 40 Fulbright program alumni across campus.
To consolidate institutional internationalization efforts, in 2015 Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth G. Furton, PhD, created the Office of Faculty & Global Affairs. Three years later, the office was rebranded as FIU Global. The reorganization brought together FIU’s Offices of Study Abroad and International Student and Scholar Services, the English Language Institute, and FIU Genoa in Italy.
Rausch-Montoto says that FIU Global’s commitment to documenting progress, reflecting on results, and using them to map more efficient and effective routes has strengthened the institution’s comprehensive internationalization efforts.
“While we’ve [always] had a lot of different units that worked on international education, we never had an umbrella office serving as a clearinghouse and working toward synergizing all of our efforts,” says Rausch-Montoto, who heads the FIU Global unit. “We have so many administrative leaders who have deep experience and knowledge in regards to internationalization. We have a lot of faculty who do brilliant things. And so nobody had ever harvested that across campus to get us together and say, ‘If we work together, we can do even more.’”
In addition to FIU Global, FIU has a number of programs and partnerships that contribute to wider campus internationalization efforts, including the LACC. Established in 1979, the center continues to serve as a hub for FIU’s extensive engagements in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Luis Guillermo Solís Rivera, PhD, former president of Costa Rica, is the interim director of LACC. The center currently has approximately 200 affiliated faculty across the university. Solís Rivera says that the center’s areas of expertise include migrations, security, and gang violence in Central America and public health in Puerto Rico with a focus on HIV issues and other infectious diseases. As a Title VI center, LACC also does outreach and instruction in local schools in Miami.
Extending its global focus to the medical field, FIU has operated the Accelerated Option Bachelor of Science in Nursing (AO BSN) for physicians educated abroad since 2001. It is the only program of its kind in the United States, says Yhovana Gordon, DNP, associate dean of academic affairs for the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The program was created to provide an educational pathway for medical doctors who were educated abroad but unable to practice in the United States, as well as to help address a nursing shortage in South Florida.
Moises Dobarganes, NP, came to the United States from Cuba at the age of 30. Although he had been trained as a medical doctor in Cuba, he was unable to meet all the requirements to practice as a doctor in the United States. Then he found his way to the AO BSN program, which served as a stepping-stone to becoming a nurse practitioner.
“It changed the way that I saw medicine and the opportunities to work with the community and interact with people in a different way,” Dobarganes says.
A final example of the institution’s excellence in global programming is a hospitality degree program with Tianjin University of Commerce (TUC) in China that FIU has operated since 2006. It is a 2+2 program, with the first 2 years taught by TUC faculty and the final 2 years taught entirely in English by FIU faculty.
“From the get-go, we established the program so that the students in China will get exposure and be taught by U.S. faculty,” says Michael Cheng, PhD, dean of the Chaplin School of Hospitality and Tourism Management.
Chinese students can also choose to finish their fourth year in Florida or come for a one-year master’s program. In addition, U.S. students studying hospitality can study abroad for a semester in Tianjin.
The program has graduated 2,700 students and is the only English-speaking hospitality program in China, according to Cheng.
The next step for internationalization at FIU was the launch of the Global Strategy 2025 plan in summer 2020 with three priority areas: student, faculty, and institutional success. The global plan is the result of the Global Strategy Committee that was convened by Furton in 2018 with the goal of guiding the institution toward more focused, strategic global engagement in alignment with institutional priorities. Representatives of all colleges and business units were included on the committee.
“It’s been a very intentional university-wide effort,” Rausch-Montoto says. “We’ve done a lot of legwork on identifying where we are, what we are doing, and where we are successful.”
For FIU Global, one area of focus is the establishment of world centers in strategic locations. “The idea is to really have a much more robust intentional presence overseas that allows our faculty and our staff and our students to have a deep connection,” Furton says.
FIU plans to open its first world center in Colombia in the near future, with others to follow in places such as Asia and the Middle East, Furton says. He says that the partnership with TUC in China is a model for future world centers where FIU can tap into its top academic programs. “We’re trying to replicate that in as many as a dozen or more locations around the world,” Furton says.
He added that Global Strategy 2025 and the world centers build on the previous work that has been done by FIU Global. “Having FIU Global has been transformational in the sense that we really didn’t realize everything that was going on at the university until we started doing this,” Furton says. Having a centralized unit focused on global engagement has “really allowed us to crystallize our plan for these world centers [and identify] where it makes the most sense to be.”
Located on the North Carolina coast, the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) is a public research university that serves approximately 18,000 students. An innovative program allows incoming students the opportunity to spend the fall semester of their freshman year studying at Bangor University in Wales before starting classes in Wilmington the following spring.
When Lawson Witherspoon got his letter of acceptance from UNCW in spring 2019, it was not exactly what he had expected. He found out he had been accepted— but not until spring 2020. “Wilmington was my dream school for a while, and at first I was a little upset,” he says. “When you’re a spring admit, you’re like…‘I gotta figure out what to do in the fall.’”
Witherspoon and his family attended a welcome program for new students, and there he found out about the First-Year Spring Admit (FYSA) program in the United Kingdom, which would allow him to spend fall semester at Bangor University in Wales. He says he had never considered the possibility of studying abroad, let alone in his first semester of college.
Witherspoon remembers polling his friends in his high school theater class to see if they thought he should do it. “It was a scary thing,” he says. “I had never been away from home, so leaving was a big thing—and not just going to college but going to college in another country.”
However, his mind eased as soon as he stepped foot in the airport. “It was a huge stressor at first, but I am so glad I just got over that initial fear,” he says.
In fall 2019, Witherspoon became part of UNCW’s FYSA in the United Kingdom cohort at Bangor University in Wales. Because admission to UNCW has become increasingly competitive over the past several years, the university offers spring admission to students, like Witherspoon, who were not admitted for the fall. “These are very good students that we simply don’t have room for in the fall,” says Michael Wilhelm, MA, associate provost of global partnerships and international education.
Many students admitted for the spring start at community college in the fall and then transfer to UNCW. But for students like Witherspoon, the Bangor program offers another pathway. “We thought about the kind of unique and transformational experience that could occur if these students were to spend their first university experience beyond high school abroad,” Wilhelm says.
Since 2014, more than 100 UNCW FYSA students have started their first year of college abroad, with a cohort of 11 students heading to Wales in fall 2021. The program was suspended for 2020–21 because of the coronavirus pandemic, but close collaboration between UNCW and Bangor University continued as Bangor faculty offered to conduct virtual guest lectures for UNCW courses in disciplines such as film studies and French history, helping to maintain the partnership and create opportunities for students to participate in global learning opportunities during the pandemic.
UNCW began the FYSA abroad program in 2014 with Maynooth University in Ireland but shifted the program to Bangor University in 2019.
“We wanted to be in a location that was different and challenging but close geographically and English-speaking,” Wilhelm says. “And in a place where we could work intensively with a trusted partner that was really dedicated to student support and services.”
The UNCW Office of International Programs was also looking for a partner with courses that would seamlessly transfer back to UNCW. Bangor fit the bill. Bangor was able to provide orientation, housing, and student services that are not always available at European universities.
Angharad Thomas, Bangor’s former director of international recruitment and development, says the program is tailored to the first-year student population. “The students are mainly 18-year-olds and are straight from [high] school, so we are dealing with visiting students who need a little bit more care and attention,” she says.
One challenge, however, was the difference between the U.S. and U.K. educational systems. Most courses in the United Kingdom have a single assessment at the end of the academic year, so staff from the two universities had to identify general education courses that would allow students to take exams in December before returning to the United States.
In addition to the FYSA in the United Kingdom program, Bangor and UNCW facilitate bilateral exchanges and have similar research strengths in areas such as marine biology. “It’s a unique partnership that benefits both sides in a lot of ways that go beyond just student mobility,” Wilhelm says.
At UNCW, the international office works closely with the admissions, student affairs, and housing departments to make sure that the students have a seamless experience from the time they receive their admissions letters to when they begin their studies in Wilmington in the spring. The admissions office helps promote the program during recruitment events, and the international office takes over once students identify that they want to be part of the FYSA in the United Kingdom program. All FYSA in the United Kingdom students also work with an academic adviser who makes sure the courses they take abroad are the right fit for their major at UNCW.
Students then participate in a virtual orientation prior to traveling to Wales. They do a series of online video sessions that allow them to get to know each other as well as learn about topics such as health and safety.
Students pay a comprehensive program fee of $13,300 that includes tuition, orientation, housing, a meal plan, health insurance, airport pick-up, excursions, and special events like a Thanksgiving celebration. This fee is close to the cost of in-state tuition for one semester at UNCW.
Since students enroll directly at Bangor University, they do not receive financial aid through UNCW, but they are eligible for federal loans. In 2018, Hurricane Florence hit the UNCW campus and caused around $150 million in damages. To help support UNCW, Bangor provided one full-ride scholarship for fall 2019, which UNCW split between all of the students in the cohort to reduce costs for everyone.
UNCW education abroad adviser Natalie Palmer, MA, works with the students once they have committed to the program. She also meets them at the airport in the United Kingdom and escorts them to the Bangor campus. “I stay for a couple days just so they’re getting comfortable and they have a friendly face that’s from UNCW,” Palmer says.
While the UNCW students are in Wales, a Bangor graduate student serves as a point of contact to answer questions they have about day-to-day life.
Although the students have multiple courses they can choose from, all participants take part in a Welsh and Celtic studies class together. Not only does it build community, but the course also helps them better understand the culture and history of the place they are studying. “We’ve always been able to have a course that also included field trips as part of the class so that students actually got to go and see what they were learning about,” says Kara Pike Inman, EdD, director of education abroad at UNCW. “And I think that always makes the experience come alive.”
Upon arrival at UNCW in January, the students participate in a traditional freshman orientation with all of the spring admits but also do a study abroad debrief and a social event just for their group. They receive priority for on-campus housing and are often paired together.
Witherspoon, now a junior, is roommates with Roshan Patel, who was also part of the FYSA in the United Kingdom cohort. “We wouldn’t have probably known each other if it wasn’t for Wales,” Witherspoon says. “We’re all like best friends. Pretty much everyone who went on the trip, we’re all connected.”
UNCW’s Office of Housing and Residence Life helps place the students in university housing in the spring so that the cohort can continue to live in the same housing area on campus. Peter Groenendyk, MA, former director of housing and residence life at UNCW, says that the Bangor cohort has a leg up over their peers who did not go abroad in the fall. “They had a good foundation of immersion into academic life, and so [they are] able to hit the ground running here at UNCW in a way that really many first-year spring admits usually wouldn’t,” he says.
That readiness translates into academic success for the FYSA in the United Kingdom participants. “We see huge payoffs in terms of the retention of these students, in terms of their persistence, and in terms of the students wanting to study abroad again,” Inman says. FYSA in the United Kingdom participants have a freshman to sophomore retention rate of 93 percent, which compares very favorably to the 85 percent retention rate in the general student population. Additionally, nearly 24 percent of FYSA abroad participants have participated in a second education abroad experience during their time at UNCW.
