Relationship Cultivation

Soon after veterinary pathologist Tony Frank became vice president for research at Colorado State University in 2000, he was asked by the then-president to accompany him to South  Korea. “I wasn’t horribly enthused,” recalled Frank. “I’d been very focused on my own lab and had almost no connections to international activity. I really didn’t see what value I was going to add or how it was going to have a big impact.” But Frank returned from Seoul “an absolute convert,” won over to the idea that forging strategic partnerships with universities overseas could expand Colorado State’s reach and pay large dividends for its scholars, researchers, and students. “To be honest, I spent a lot of time kicking myself after that for having missed as many opportunities as I had over the years,” said Frank, who went on to become provost and, in 2008, president. He now has logged 12 international trips. 

The land-grant institution, established in 1870 when Colorado was still a territory, is working hard not to miss opportunities these days. It has close partnerships with 17 universities in 11 countries including a new Joint Research Institute with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and a robust dual-degree program with the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam. It has stepped up recruitment of international students to the picturesque Fort Collins campus in the foothills of the Rockies. In 2008–2009 there were fewer than 900 international students. Today there are more than 1,650, including a recent influx of more than 400 in its new intensive English and academic preparatory program called INTO Colorado State University. 

CSU is following a script laid out in a 2007 internationalization strategy. Leaders speak of “building the brand” and improving lives “throughout Colorado and the world.” Tom Milligan, vice president for external relations, who spearheads the branding push, said, “Being a global institution is part of how we want to think and talk about ourselves and position ourselves. We’re different from other medium-to-large-size public institutions. The things that we’re good at, like water, biomedicine, and veterinary medicine, we’re as good as anybody in the world.”

Links Around the World

Vice Provost for International Affairs James Cooney said, “The heart of our internationalization strategy from the beginning has been to link specifically to institutions around the world, get our faculty involved with those institutions, and develop joint research.” The hiring of Cooney in 2007 to a new position with elevated stature was also part of that strategy. The political scientist was lured to Fort Collins from Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

One aspect of Colorado State’s story is familiar to public universities almost everywhere: steep state budget cuts, amounting to $36 million or 28 percent over three years before a $6 million bump up this year. Only federal stimulus funds spared Colorado’s universities steeper cuts. The National Science Foundation ranked Colorado last among research universities in state funding per student. Colorado State relies on state money for less than 10 percent of its $911 million budget. It conducted $376 million in research in 2012. 

"President Tony Frank came late to international work but now pursues it with a convert’s passion."

The $220,000 that Cooney’s office had been given to expand education abroad, strategic partnerships, and other activities was shaved by $40,000. But its budget and staff kept growing thanks to $330,000 in added revenues from the spurt in international enrollments and new partnerships in China and elsewhere. “We feel we have one of the best models for working with China,” said the vice provost. China pays for up to 30 faculty to travel to China for research collaborations and steers talented students from a dozen high schools to CSU. Colorado State, for its part, gives each an $8,000 scholarship. It opened a five-person recruiting office at East China Normal University and recently cut the ribbon on a Confucius Institute specializing in water issues. 

A New Pathway “Into” the University

Colorado State is one of four U.S. universities partnering with INTO, a for-profit British company that forms partnerships with universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and China to recruit students and place them in intensive English and “academic pathways” classes with extensive support that lead to regular undergraduate and graduate studies. Provost Rick Miranda said, “We’d like to have more students come from South America, from Europe, from Malaysia and Indonesia. We don’t want to skew things too much toward China.” INTO has moved into renovated Spruce Hall, CSU’s oldest building. Many students live with domestic students interested in world affairs on a floor of a dorm designated the Global Village.

Haotian “Stewart” Wu, a senior business administration major from Hefei, China, is a live-in mentor there. He transferred to CSU as a junior from Anhui Agricultural University on a 2+2 program. He spent summer 2012 as a paid INTO “ambassador” traveling around China marketing CSU at education abroad fairs. The outgoing Wu has friends on the football team and attends games. Football “is pretty boring, but actually I learn a lot” about U.S. culture, said Wu.

The Office of International Programs teams with the athletics and alumni offices to offer a “Football 101” class where international students learn the rules, try on helmets and shoulder pads, tailgate, and attend a game. “They get a real kick out of it,” said Mark Hallett, senior director of International Student and Scholar Services. As many as 200 turn out and “scream with excitement” at kickoff. 

Grooming Gilman and Fulbright Scholars

Colorado State has also stepped up its education abroad offerings and, by raising funds from colleges, departments, donors, and providers, tripled scholarships to $150,000. Director of Education Abroad Laura Thornes said more than 800 students took classes for credit, and 500 took part in noncredit experiences in 2012–2013. Most went to Western Europe, but 115 studied or worked in China and Japan, 25 went to Kenya, and 17 to South Africa. One in six students has studied abroad by graduation. “If we could get to 25 percent, that would be our ideal,” said Thornes.

A push to encourage Colorado State students to apply for Benjamin Gilman International Scholarships paid immediate dividends. Two dozen won Gilmans in 2012 and 2013, more than the previous four years combined. The awards of up to $5,000 go to students who receive need-based Pell Grants. “We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman,” said Thornes. Faculty and staff volunteers read and critiqued students’ essays. Accounting major Sabiha Dubose said her Gilman to study in Antibes, France, was “truly a blessing.”

“We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman.”

A similar push is underway for Fulbrights. Karen Gardenier, the Office of International Programs’ assistant director for academic programs, works with representatives from each of CSU’s eight colleges. Fewer than a dozen students applied in past years and only a handful won. “We’re hoping to get those numbers up and create more of a culture on campus for Fulbright,” said Gardenier. That effort includes small stipends for faculty to handpick and groom prospects. CSU also increased incoming Fulbrighters in the past five years from five to 35 annually.

International and Arabic studies major Brooke Lake is spending six months in Morocco and Jordan improving her Arabic before graduation. Lake, who volunteers as a cultural mentor to international students, did charity work in Egypt over an earlier summer, which “kick started my passion for the Middle East.” This all took her family by surprise. “They had no idea who their daughter was. My mom was like, ‘Who are you?’” recalled Lake, but now “she loves it.”

Making Music Together

There is a musical quality to CSU’s partnership with East China Normal University. After President Frank heard a concert in Shanghai, he set in motion a collaboration between the two universities’ musicians. East China’s opera director Cao Jin and Todd Queen, chair of music, theater, and dance, quickly “hit it off,” said Queen, a tenor who sang and taught master classes at the Shanghai institution. Twenty-five ECNU students and faculty came to Fort Collins in 2010 and with CSU’s orchestra and choir they performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with its “Ode to Joy,” a universal anthem for freedom. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Queen.

Mezzo-soprano Carol Perry sang in Shanghai in 2011. The experience was invaluable, she told a college publication. “In the performance world, we have to adapt to other cultures quickly. Not every production or rehearsal will be in your language. You need to be present in the culture you’re in,” she said. Most recently, Chinese and Colorado State students performed The Yellow River Cantata in CSU’s concert hall.

It is not the arts alone bringing CSU and ECNU together. They created a Joint Research Institute for New Energy and the Environment in 2011, with each committing to spend $300,000 annually for three years on the search for clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Wei Gao, a professor of ecosystem science and sustainability who directs the CSU China Programs office and Confucius Institute, also leads this research institute, which works on land, water, air quality, and climate issues.

Playing Pachelbel and Parsing P&G Financials

Since 2008, 32 economics and business faculty have taught compressed, four-week courses at Foreign Trade University (FTU) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which is “trying to reform its curriculum to mimic ours,” said economics professor Robert Kling. “It has really contributed to the internationalization of our faculty and had the unanticipated effect of giving our department more of a sense of community.” Vietnam’s education ministry pays CSU $23,000 for each course taught.

Thirty Vietnamese students spend their senior year at CSU and earn dual degrees. One is Phong Nguyen, who could be found one afternoon in a theater lobby of Lory Student Center playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a grand piano. The dual-degree program “is considered the best in our university,” Nguyen said. Classes at CSU were “more practical and down to earth,” added Nguyen, who liked working in teams to analyze a Dell bond issue and a Procter & Gamble financial report. “We’re learning from each other and from doing the projects.”

FTU is a CSU strategic partner. Many of those partnerships have been forged in rapid succession since 2008. Chad Hoseth, director of international initiatives, said CSU is now assessing all 17 and considering changes. “This is a list that evolves to meet the needs of our faculty and students,” he said.

Protecting Tigers and People

Protecting natural resources is a passion at Colorado State and much of that work is conducted on an international scale. Nearly 90 Indian Forestry Service officers have trained at CSU. Social psychologist Michael Manfredo heads the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, which deals with finding ways for people to enjoy nature without trampling on it. Managing wildlife and natural resources “is 10 percent biology and 90 percent managing people,” said Manfredo, just back from working on an effort to reduce tiger-human conflicts in Dehadrun, India.

The department also offers a Conservation Leadership Through Learning master’s degree that involves a year of classes in Fort Collins and a second year of field work in Mexico. Seven of the first 21 students were international, and the program is expanding to Peru, New Zealand, and Kenya. In the field, Manfredo said, “everybody is a learner. The professors are learning new ways of thinking (just) as the students are.”

Manfredo said the elevated stature of the Office of International Programs helped get that program off the ground. “It sure makes it easier when you’ve got someone appreciative and supportive of what you’re doing,” he said.

Prairie Populism Writ Large

Robin Reid, director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation in the Warner College of Natural Resources, spent 20 years in East Africa conducting livestock research. Support from the top at CSU, she said, “is sparking connections all over the place. It’s causing this cross-campus set of energy and activities that is good for (everybody).” Research ecologist Paul Evangelista, who has worked in Ethiopia for 14 years, said CSU has long fostered his interdisciplinary work. 

Hoseth, the international initiatives director, said, “Our genetics are collaborative.” Case in point: when the College of Business hired its own study abroad coordinator, they placed her in Laurel Hall with the rest of the international program staff.

Hallett, the ISSS director, said, “There’s a bit of the prairie populist about this campus. It’s a land grant, outward-focused (institution) with a lot of idealism,” and now it’s doing extension work writ large on the international stage. 

Four words encapsulated the theme of Randy Woodson’s installation in 2010 as the fourteenth chancellor of North Carolina State University: “Locally responsive. Globally engaged.” The message was woven throughout the “Pathway to the Future” strategic plan that was quickly produced on Woodson’s watch. More than a catchphrase, it has become a compass for colleges, deans, and faculty at the 127-year-old, land-grant institution.

It remains a source of pride that the university has extension offices in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties, but now it also touts strategic partnerships with 20 universities on four continents, culled from a roster of hundreds of memoranda of understanding (MOU). International enrollments have surged to more than 3,400, including hundreds of undergraduates, once few and far between. The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is growing, too, and working more closely with student life, housing, and other units to better serve the newcomers. In part by trimming administrative bloat and consolidating programs, Woodson and Provost Warwick Arden husbanded the resources for an $18 million Faculty Excellence Program to hire 48 interdisciplinary faculty to work in clusters to address “the global grand challenges of society.”

“There was a lot of pent up energy when I got here,” said Woodson, a former Purdue University provost who began his career as a horticulturist studying how Israel grew fruits and vegetables in the desert. NC State, like Purdue, is an engineering bastion. On a campus with 34,000 students, nearly 9,000 are pursuing engineering degrees, including half the international students. One thing that surprised the chancellor upon arrival in Raleigh was that only 10 percent of the student body was from outside North Carolina, far below the 18 percent cap enshrined in state law. “Why aren’t we at 18 percent?” Woodson immediately asked. The response was that the university did not get to keep any extra tuition revenue from enrolling more outsiders. “I said, ‘I don’t care. It’s important for the reputation of the university, it’s important for the experience of students from North Carolina to study side by side with kids from Korea, China, India, and Indiana.”

Shrey Satpathy, 19, a sophomore nuclear engineering major from New Delhi, India, quickly made his presence felt on campus, winning selection at the end of freshman year as a Caldwell Fellow, a leadership program, and also capturing a $50,000 prize in a statewide technology competition. He and a classmate proposed a way for new public school teachers in North Carolina to share and evaluate lesson plans online; the prize money is to make that a reality.

Satpathy sees nothing unusual in an international undergraduate’s immersing himself in the problems of U.S. public schools. “I don’t consider myself an outsider. I consider myself more of a global citizen,” he said, and besides, “when you start something, it has a ripple” effect that could help teachers far beyond North Carolina’s borders.

Bringing International Programs to the Fore

Bailian Li, vice provost for international affairs, said the new strategic plan and the buy-in from all 12 colleges has truly made his office “the center for global engagement. We play the leadership role.” When Li arrived in 2006, the Office of International Affairs had a 16-member staff. Now it numbers 40. Political scientist Heidi Hobbs, who directs a popular master of international studies program, said, “International used to be, ‘Oh yeah, that’s them over there and they’re doing something international.’ Now it’s moved from the periphery to the central mission of the university.”

Funding is one reason the Office of International Affairs cuts a larger figure. It has $120,000 to spend each year to fund joint faculty research and education initiatives with those 20 strategic partners. The sum includes $35,000 in seed grants to faculty to promote collaborations. Li said his office has funded more than 40 international projects since 2011 and more than half these faculty have gone on to win additional support for their work.

Veterinary professor Siddhartha “Sid” Thakur used his $5,000 seed grant for a pilot project to monitor food-borne pathogens in meat sold in two states in India, a country with no such monitoring system. He enlisted hospitals and veterinary colleges for the effort in his native land. “That seed grant gave me money to go to India, talk to these people, and then write a bigger grant,” he said, which came in the amount of $100,000 from the World Health Organization. Thakur, a former Food and Drug Administration scientist, said, “I cannot solve drug resistance issues in North Carolina alone. How quickly these pathogens move around the globe is amazing.” Two Indian agricultural ministry officials have visited NC State, and Chancellor Woodson paid a return visit last year.

Tourism professor Duarte Morais, another seed grant recipient, has conducted research and worked with villagers in Tanzania, the Philippines, and Indonesia as well as with Native Americans on an extension project in North Carolina to help poor communities reap benefits from tourism. Morais, who is from Portugal, said, “When I applied to come here, I made a pledge to become an engaged scholar doing research and work here in North Carolina as a laboratory for other places in the world, and to teach classes that were engaged locally, but global in nature. That’s the walk I’m walking.”

Textile engineering professor Marian McCord was tapped to direct a new Global Health Initiative. McCord works on bringing affordable sanitary products to women in developing countries. “When your leadership puts global engagement at the forefront, you’re empowered and enabled to work on nonconventional types of research,” she said.

Among the 20 strategic partners are University of Surrey in the United Kingdom and Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, which have a three-way relationship with NC State that they call the University Global Partnership Network. David Dixon, the international programs coordinator, said each institution committed $60,000 to promote joint research, exchange faculty and students, develop new academic programs, and fuel innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology transfer. In three years they’ve convened six conferences and a dozen workshops and funded 17 research collaborations.

Promoting Study Abroad with Scholarships and a Bus “Wrap”

Twenty percent of undergraduates study abroad, most on short-term, faculty-led programs, and Li and Ingrid Schmidt, associate vice provost and director of study abroad, are shooting for 30 percent. Not long ago only one student in eight studied abroad. “We know that study abroad is what we call a high-impact experience,” said Provost Warwick Arden. “It feeds directly into the success of our students. We’re trying to produce a student who’s prepared for a successful career in a global knowledge economy.”

NC State has made a concentrated push to encourage more low-income and minority students to sign up for overseas study. It mounted a “People Like Me” marketing campaign that featured scores of posters and even a campus bus wrapped with photos of smiling faces of education abroad veterans. The campaign was the handiwork of Schmidt and Joanne Woodard, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, as part of NC State’s participation in the American Council on Education’s “At Home in the World” initiative. Wrapping the bus—something more commonly done to advertise Wolfpack athletic teams—cost $7,000 but “we got a lot of mileage out of that,” said Schmidt. Woodard said they discovered “a natural synergy” between the international and diversity offices. Schmidt agreed, saying, “We can greatly enrich each other.” Advertisements alone don’t do the job. Schmidt’s office dispensed $225,000 in study abroad scholarships in 2012–2013.

The Study Abroad Office began offering Global Perspectives Certificates in 2009 to students who complete a mix of study, service, research, or internships abroad, engage in international activities on campus, and make a final presentation on their experiences. Ninety have earned the certificate and 375 more are pursuing one. Those requirements were no problem for Janet Nguyen, a senior international studies major who studied in China and founded NC State’s first Asian-interest sorority. Nguyen, who envisions a career working on behalf of children, said new courses such as “Global Perspectives on Sustainable Development” provided her “with a very diverse and unique learning experience.”

Seeking Allies to Serve International Students

Ten years ago, NC State enrolled fewer than 1,600 international students who constituted 5 percent of the student body. Now there are twice as many. While the OIA staff has grown, it is still a challenge to meet all the needs of the growing number of international students and scholars.

When Elizabeth James came on board as director of the Office of International Services (OIS) in 2012, “we were woefully outnumbered in terms of our student-to-adviser ratio. We were about 1,000-to-one … and most of our peers are running around 650 to 700,” she said.

Making a virtue of necessity, her office now works much more closely with academic advisers in NC State’s 10 colleges. It also improved its technological capability, making it easier for students to find answers on the OIS website, and it makes ample use of social media. “We had a bit of a paradigm shift. We were under no illusions that we were going to double or triple our size, so we strategically started working with a lot of the college advisers and our natural partners in the counseling center,” said Thomas Greene, the associate director. James said they recognized that “we can’t be everywhere. By collaborating, we don’t have to be a mini–student affairs division just for international students.”

To attract more international students, NC State launched an intensive English program in 2011. “The first semester we had eight students and two teachers,” recalled Jeong Powell, the admissions officer who started the program. By 2012, there were 161 students and 14 instructors, and to date nearly 120 students have matriculated into degree programs. The Korean-born Powell subsequently became the first full-time director of international admissions and established a pipeline from four top high schools in China and three in South Korea. Associate Vice Provost and Director of Admissions Tommy Griffin twice has flown in high school guidance counselors from Asia to see for themselves what NC State has to offer. “Our campus was ready” for this push, said Griffin. “We really have a lot of advocates in our colleges and all the other offices on campus. They all see a benefit.”

Branch Campus for a French Business School

SKEMA Business School opened a branch on the NC State campus in 2011. The French school brings 300 students a year in cohorts to Raleigh, where it rents a facility amidst not only the engineering school and other colleges, but dozens of high-tech businesses and nonprofits that have set up research shops on the new Centennial Campus. SKEMA, which has three campuses in France and another in Suzhou, China (all classes are in English), boasts that it is one of the few foreign schools with its own U.S. facility and the sole one vested with the authority to process U.S. visas. Most SKEMA graduate students stay for three months and return to France, but some study for a full year. Dean Jacques Verville envisions attracting North American undergraduates who could start in Raleigh “and then move to our campuses in Europe and China. When you have that flow, that’s SKEMA.”

NC State enrolls 220 international business students in its own Poole College of Management, something Dean Ira Weiss calls “phenomenal. They give our students an extra push for their money. They bring a hunger and energy to the table that energizes everybody around them.” Poole and SKEMA already offer dual master’s degrees in Global Luxury Management and more are planned.

The SKEMA students also benefit from an International Cultural Leadership Project (ICLP) that brings hundreds of international students together with NC State undergraduates for workshops, seminars, community service, and social gatherings, from volunteering at food banks to ball games and bowling nights. Volunteers logged more than 900 hours of service in 2013–2014.

The project is run through the Office of International Affairs’ Global Training Initiative, which provides fee-based programs and services for international universities, businesses, and other clients. “The vast majority of our programs are short term and we do a mix, half for professionals and half for students,” said Ilin Misaras, the assistant director. A four-week summer program gives Chinese undergraduates “a taste of graduate school,” Misaras said, and another partnership brings in students from Brazil. It also places international students in internships throughout the technology-rich Research Triangle area. It has given Chinese pharmaceutical executives a short course on FDA drug regulations.

“The challenge for us is to grow beyond just these short-term training programs,” said Misaras, a former broadcast journalist. “Part of our mandate is to help the North Carolina business community. We have connections in China. How can we help North Carolina businesses get there? I think that’s the next step.”

Expanding a Foothold in Prague

NC State explored accepting an invitation from the government of South Korea to open a branch at the new Songdo Global University alongside SUNY, George Mason University, and other foreign universities, but it ultimately declined. “The economy hit us,” said Chancellor Woodson.

Provost Arden said, “We prefer to develop strong relationships with partner institutions as opposed to planting the flag and setting up our own. We  feel that that gives us much more bang for the buck.”

But NC State is considering ways to expand the foothold its College of Design has in Prague, Czech Republic. It has been sending architecture majors to study in Prague during the summer for years and in 2005 that summer program evolved into the Prague Institute, with classes year-round in a thirteenth-century building in the middle of the history-rich city. It was the first overseas branch of any North Carolina university and “we actually had to get the signature of the governor of North Carolina to permit us to rent our own facility,” recalled Dean Marvin Malecha. Woodson calls the Prague Institute “one of our real success stories.” It now offers courses for a broad array of students, and the university is looking at ways to make it a center for faculty scholarship, not just short teaching stints.

The University of Delaware (UD) traces its roots to a colonial academy that produced three signers of the Declaration of Independence. It was chartered as a college in 1834 and selected as a land-grant institution after the Civil War. It has a rich tradition of study abroad, a robust intensive English institute, and a $200 million research enterprise. But when Patrick Harker became president in 2007, he was perturbed to learn that only 39 incoming freshmen—1 percent—came from other countries. No institution could reach the first tier of research universities with so few international students in its classrooms, he told the faculty. Today UD enrolls nearly 700 international undergraduates as well as 1,300 graduate students with 1,600 others learning English. “We turned that around. You can feel it on campus today. It just feels more diverse. But we’ve got more work to do,” said Harker, former dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Structural changes were necessary to accommodate the growth spurt. UD’s Office for International Students and Scholars (OISS), which once consisted of two people in tight quarters, now has a 10-person staff ensconced in a Georgian mansion at the heart of campus. “I feel like Cinderella,” said Frances O’Brien, the assistant director.

The relocation to the Wright House, formerly the faculty club, is “both metaphor and evidence of the university’s commitment to its international community,” said Nancy Guerra, former associate provost for international programs and director of the parent Institute for Global Studies (IGS), which provides grants to faculty, forges international partnerships, and oversees OISS and education abroad. Creating the institute was a key recommendation in a 2008 “Path to Prominence” strategic plan on how to elevate the stature of international programs and intensify global activity on all fronts.

“We made a small number of critical organizational changes that paid big dividends,” said Nancy Brickhouse, former deputy provost. Consolidating international programs provided “a much higher degree of visibility and access across campus” and enabled UD to attract faculty and professionals with deep experience in global education, said Brickhouse, now provost of Saint Louis University.

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Among them was OISS Director Ravi Ammigan, who brought a wealth of programming experience from Michigan State University in 2013. The international office ramped up activities and “now we are a center of cross-cultural engagement as well,” he said.

Placing Delaware on the Map

Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, is second smallest by size and forty-fifth by population. “Our big challenge is how to increase our international visibility. We don’t yet have really good global recognition,” said Guerra, a psychologist who stepped down as associate provost and IGS head to return full time to teaching and research on stopping childhood violence. Chris Lucier, vice president for enrollment management, said, “The location actually appeals to students once they know how close we are to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York. The strength of our engineering and business programs are major selling points.”

Reeling in more talent from abroad makes academic and economic sense, because UD already must look outside Delaware’s borders for 60 percent of its 21,000 students. It describes itself as a “state-assisted” institution, not fully public, since it is governed by its own trustees (the governor is an ex officio member) and gets only 13 percent of the budget from state coffers. “People assume we’re a big public institution. The reality is we’re medium sized and a public-private hybrid,” said Amy Greenwald Foley, IGS’s associate director for global outreach. “We have smaller classes and offer amenities you’d expect to find at a private institution.” 

UD competes with larger flagship schools such as Penn State, Rutgers, and the University of Maryland. Among the attractions are the classic college-town feel of Newark (population 32,000) and a picture-book campus with stately elms shading Georgian buildings that line the Green.

Push for Global Engagement

Harker, a management expert trained as a civil and urban engineer, shook up UD’s budgeting and pushed colleges to eliminate low-demand programs. He believes the changes spurred departments to become more entrepreneurial and globally engaged. “It’s helped people be more creative about what kinds of programs we can offer and what types of grants we can go after,” said Harker, who stepped down in July to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Since 2003 UD has hosted top students from the Middle East and North Africa for civic leadership training funded by the U.S. Department of State, and more recently it was selected as one of 20 universities providing coursework and mentoring for young leaders from across Africa. It launched a UD Africa initiative in 2013 to increase partnerships with African universities and send more faculty and students to the continent. “A host of faculty do research in Africa,” said Gretchen Bauer, chair of political science and international relations, who is headed to Ghana on a Fulbright in 2016.

Norma Gaines-Hanks, a human development and family services professor, has taken students to South Africa for study and service eight times. Enrollment is capped at 30. “If the kids had their way, we’d take 100,” she said.

Academic and Cultural Ties with China

UD has made its greatest progress in expanding academic ties in China. A close relationship with Xiamen University extends back to 2007, including a dual doctoral degree in oceanography. UD is one of the U.S. campuses where Xiamen is sending dozens of doctoral students being groomed as future faculty.

Xiamen helped UD land a Confucius Institute in 2010 and provides two Mandarin teachers on loan, and the two universities are partnering to open a State Department–funded American Cultural Center on the Xiamen campus, one of 24 such centers across China.

“There are so many Confucius Institutes around the country. We want to be different,” said Jianguo Chen, the director and a professor of Chinese literature. He wants to provide expertise for Chinese entrepreneurs who are seeking to break into U.S. markets and American firms looking to do business in China.

Engineering in the Forefront

The pacesetter in many of UD’s efforts to extend its global reach is the College of Engineering led by Dean Babatunde Ogunnaike, a former DuPont researcher and member of the National Academy of Engineering. A new global engineering program combining bachelor’s and master’s degrees in five years is on the drawing boards. “My tagline for students is, ‘Let’s go change the world together,’” said the Nigerian-born Ogunnaike. Engineering is the most international of UD’s colleges, with 627 students from other countries, including Ugochukwu Nsofor, who is studying electromagnetics and nanophotonics for his doctorate. Nsofor volunteers at orientations for international students, which have undergone “a huge improvement” since OISS expanded, he said.

The four dozen students in UD’s Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter are trying to change the world already. They designed and built a bridge connecting two remote villages in Guatemala, completed a clean water project in Cameroon, and have scouted projects in Malawi and the Philippines. Over winter break, senior Kelsey McWilliams traveled to India with a UD team on a Gates Foundation–funded project to improve latrines. That project was started by the late civil engineering professor Steve Dentel, who recently lost a battle with cancer. Dentel, the original EWB adviser, had been to Cameroon 11 times.

IGS and the College of Engineering split costs of a newly created associate director position to manage the college’s international programs and work across disciplines with other colleges.

Keeping Study Abroad Affordable

The junior year abroad originated at UD. The first students’ embarkation in 1923 on an ocean liner bound for France made front-page news in the New York Times. Now 1,300 students head abroad each year, mostly in classes taught by scores of UD faculty over the five week winter term. One-third study abroad before graduation.

But costs are a concern, said Lisa Chieffo, the associate director. Fees for some programs top $10,000 (including airfare and housing but not tuition). The university has doubled aid for study abroad to $1 million and launched a Delaware Diplomats program that allows freshmen to earn up to $1,500 for study or internships abroad by participating in global events on campus, including lectures and international coffee hours. Fifty students enlisted in the first corps.

Kerry Snyder, 22, a wildlife conservation major who works in the global studies office, put several scholarships together that paid for a service class in Cambodia and two research trips to Nicaragua. “I’d like to see programs that are more affordable, honestly, because that is a barrier. Students come in and they’re so excited, but they just don’t have the money,” said Snyder.

In 2014 the university launched a World Scholars Program that offers incoming freshmen the opportunity to spend their first semester at John Cabot University in Rome. Six signed up, including Daria Collins, a budding linguistics major now learning Japanese and planning to study abroad again. “I definitely feel like a world scholar,” she said. Thirty-eight freshmen started classes in Rome in fall 2015 and Foley began scouting for a second partner university in Madrid. 

Cynthia Schmidt-Cruz, professor of Spanish and interim director of the Center for Global and Area Studies, believes study abroad scholarships could entice more students to pursue a new minor in global studies that attracted 10 students last year.

A Fruitful Partnership on International Recruiting

UD’s English Language Institute (ELI) has grown so rapidly that its classrooms have spilled into seven buildings, including what was once the home of a Delaware paper mill magnate. Sixteen hundred students passed through its classrooms and labs in 2014–2015. More than a quarter came through a Conditional Admission Program (CAP) that guarantees entry to credit classes with no TOEFL required once they make the grade in language classes.

Once UD gave a green light for CAP in 2009, “we were off to the races,” said Director Scott Stevens, who won NAFSA’s 2015 Cassandra Pyle Award for Leadership and Collaboration for his efforts to raise standards for intensive English programs. 

The ELI and UD’s Admissions Office once worked apart on international recruitment, but “it’s a very integrated team now,” said Vice President for Enrollment Management Lucier. International applications shot up 50 percent in two years. The enrollment surge presented challenges for UD as some students struggled to adjust to campus and academic life. “The whole transition to the culture of academia is critical,” said Stevens. The institute now forms cohorts of five to eight CAP students, each with a U.S. student mentor. Residing in global living communities, they read books together, work on study skills, and learn respect for academic standards, but also go on scavenger hunts and a weekend retreat.

The campus wide collaborative culture is apparent in the Global Recruitment and Retention Group that includes academic advisers and representatives from residence life, career services, and the counseling center. It meets monthly to brainstorm not only how to attract international students, but also how to better support them once they arrive. 

Breaking the Ice with Facebook

Jill Neitzel and Patricia Sloane-White’s popular Anthropology 230 class on the lives of the “Young, Global, and Privileged” takes an innovative approach to breaking the ice between domestic and international students. Neitzel and Sloan-White assign readings and videos but the bulk of the work consists of student responses on a private Facebook page to a volley of questions on topics including inequality, race and gender, and pop culture and partying.

Students watched videos on racial tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, but also viewed a hilarious skit by the Fung Brothers, a duo of Chinese-American comedians, on “the Asian bubble” on U.S. campuses. They examined the huge gaps in both countries between the rich and working classes.

“It’s not all just ‘Let’s be friends,’” said Neitzel. “We approach this as a serious academic class, but rather than my standing up there lecturing, it’s participatory engagement in learning about other cultures anthropologically.”

The class drew raves. “I really wanted to have some Americans friends. Before this class, it did not work out,” said a Chinese student. “I even got to know Chinese culture better.” Using Facebook as a teaching tool was “absolutely brilliant,” said an American student.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) relationship with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador started in an Amazonian jungle. Biology Professor Stephen Walsh first met Carlos Mena, who would become his PhD student and then later join USFQ as a professor, during a research trip to Ecuador in the late 1990s. Their personal relationship paved the way for a comprehensive partnership between their two institutions that culminated in the establishment of the Galápagos Science Center in 2011. UNC-Chapel Hill’s relationship with USFQ has subsequently expanded to include interdisciplinary research, student and faculty exchange, and community engagement, much of it focused on developing local capacity in the Galápagos Islands.

Building Strategic Partnerships

UNC-Chapel Hill’s collaboration with USFQ is characteristic of its larger approach to internationalization. According to Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, UNC-Chapel Hill has chosen to focus on creating deep relationships that span multiple disciplines and ultimately result in engagement with local communities.

“Our key partnerships were established through faculty-to-faculty connections. Partnerships grow to include additional faculty, departments, and areas of study. Our team from UNC-Chapel Hill Global then helps develop partnerships, trying to extend them into new areas,” she says.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s long-term engagement in Ecuador was born out of Walsh’s and Mena’s joint research in the Galápagos, which Walsh first visited in 2006 as part of a project with the Galápagos National Park and the Nature Conservancy. “I continued to go back and forth to the Galápagos trying to understand their local needs, but to also begin to develop a UNC vision of what a long-term commitment in the Galápagos might look like,” Walsh says.

USFQ was interested in trying to identify a partner in the Galápagos to expand from undergraduate teaching to a more comprehensive research mission. “For us, we needed to make our presence in [the] Galápagos stronger. We needed an ally for that,” Mena says.

Infrastructure as Key to Sustainable Research

According to Walsh, the two institutions jointly identified infrastructure development as key to creating a sustainable research program in the Galápagos, which he says often suffers from a “one-and-done mentality where people go, gather data, write papers, and go home.”

“What we wanted to do is break this traditional approach to research and create something that is more connected to the needs of the Galápagos. Usually, research is done by foreign scientists who come to the Galápagos, and take their results with them when they leave. We wanted to change from that to something that is growing up from the community,” Mena adds.

In addition to discussing student mobility, they decided that there was a need to build a physical structure as the core of the collaboration between the two institutions.

“If we could build the Galápagos Science Center (GSC) and equip it with needed laboratories, providing unique capacity for science and education in the Galápagos, that would be the basis for an important increase into understanding the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in the Galápagos,” Walsh says.

It took almost five years from the time when UNCChapel Hill and USFQ first signed a general memorandum of understanding in 2007 to when the center opened its doors in 2011. Although UNC-Chapel Hill cannot legally own property in the Galápagos due to Ecuadorian law, the funding and construction were equally shared between the two institutions. More than 50 faculty members have subsequently been involved in the partnership.

Having a local base has made research easier for visiting faculty. Diego Riveros-Iregui is a physical geographer in the emerging field of ecohydrology—  “where life and water intersect,” as he puts it. He has spent time at the Galápagos Science Center studying the relationship between water, plants, and soils in tropical regions.

“I have been working in the tropics for several years and have run into many of the same challenges that everyone faces: customs, permits, maintenance of equipment, data collection, sample preservation, etc. When the opportunity to work in the Galápagos came up, working with the staff at the GSC facilitated many of the aforementioned challenges, giving me time to focus on research,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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Human and Ecological Systems Meet in the Galápagos

Mena says that scientific research in the Galápagos has traditionally been focused on hard science in areas such as botany, zoology, and evolution. From the beginning, they wanted to position the Galápagos Science Center as an interdisciplinary hub.

“The Galápagos are oftentimes thought of as Darwin’s paradise. But when you’re there, you can’t help but understand that the environment is changing and interacting with people, and shaping their behaviors,” Walsh says.

He adds that it was evident they needed to involve social sciences: “Two hundred twenty-five thousand tourists came to the Galápagos in 2015. About 30,000 residents live in the Galápagos Islands on four populated islands. It’s clear that it’s not just about ecology. It’s about the connection of people and ecology.”

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Maya Weinberg is a Latin American studies and political science major who took a gap year from UNC-Chapel Hill to do an internship at the GSC. She worked with Walsh on a project using global information software (GIS) to map out human development on San Cristóbal. She was involved with mapping buildings and putting together a report on infrastructure development.

She says that the interdisciplinary nature of the work at the GSC—and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects in multiple fields—allowed her to make connections she wouldn’t otherwise have made: “With my experience working with human development, conservation, as well as geography I have become increasingly interested in policy and politics, as these are the disciplines that connect all three.”

The Importance of Engaging with the Local Community

Mena says that they built the center with the goal of providing more information to local communities and politicians to make informed decisions on issues such as health, tourism, infrastructure, and economic development.

He says that members of the local community are included in the research process. They work with a community board that keeps the GSC informed of local interests, and have close partnerships with Galápagos National Park and the local government council in order to find better ways to protect the islands.

UNC-Chapel Hill is currently engaging the community in the area of health. A new hospital was recently built on San Cristóbal, and representatives of both UNC and USFQ met with the director of the hospital and the ministry of health for the Galápagos. In 2016 the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing sent a delegation to USFQ in Quito and to the Galápagos to visit the new hospital.

GSC also keeps the community informed about the results of its ongoing research. Kelly Houck is a biological anthropologist and UNC PhD candidate who studies human health. As part of her fieldwork on San Cristóbal, she collected samples of tap water to test for contamination as well as took blood, urine, and fecal samples from local residents to measure different health impacts.

“The water samples needed to be tested within 24 hours of collection and because of GSC infrastructure, we were able to give the results back immediately to the households and provide suggestions for treating contaminated water, such as boiling or using bottled water for drinking,” she says.

“In addition, we were able to provide them with preliminary results from their blood and urine test for indicators of infections, and advise them to seek further free testing at the hospital on San Cristóbal,” she adds.

Young adds that it is not only the local community in the Galápagos that benefits from the partnership. UNC-Chapel Hill’s undergraduate students have also been able to participate in opportunities through the partnership. In addition to semester or year-long exchanges to USFQ, undergraduates can also take advantage of faculty-led summer programs.

Billy Gerhard graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s in biology and then earned a master’s of science in public health in environmental sciences and engineering. As an undergraduate, he did a summer program at the GSC in 2012. The next summer he returned as a winner of the Vimy award, a grant of up to $15,000 given annually to an interdisciplinary team of students working collaboratively to pursue research or service projects outside the United States. He is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering at Duke University.

“The project definitely impacted my career trajectory. Working abroad required me to plan ahead, anticipate problems, organize contingencies, and communicate effectively. These skills are useful in any career and the opportunity to practice them was invaluable,” he says.

“I am currently writing the results of my research on drinking water in San Cristobal for publication,” he adds.

UNC has also sent local K–12 and community college educators to the Galápagos through its World View program, which strives to help teachers give their own students global competency. “We’ve seen this partnership benefit those beyond our campus as well,” she says.

Young says that having faculty members who are deeply committed to the local community has been key from a partnership development standpoint.

“It couldn’t have happened without two institutions that wanted it to happen, and two leaders, Carlos and I, who saw a vision, transmitted it to other faculty and students, and moved forward with a program that would be committed to community outreach, education, and research at a marvelous place,” Walsh adds.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Read more about University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

On January 31, 1891, the Tampa Bay Hotel, the pet project of railroad magnate Henry B. Plant, opened its doors with 500-plus rooms and quarter-mile long corridors. More than 125 years later, Plant Hall, as it’s known today, serves as the main administrative and academic building of the University of Tampa (UT), which moved into the iconic building in 1933. Just as tourists flocked to the Tampa Bay Hotel at the dawn of the twentieth century, the University of Tampa itself has become a destination for more than 8,000 students from 50 states and 140 countries.

Ronald L. Vaughn, who became president in 1995, says that UT began internationalizing in the early 1990s. “Early on we invested heavily in exposing our faculty to the world and different cultures. That definitely helped to speed along our development,” he says.

Early international initiatives paved the way for comprehensive internationalization, culminating with a 2005 accreditation review by the Southern Association of College and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). UT chose to create and implement a quality enhancement plan (QEP), Building International Competence, as part of the accreditation process.

“When I look at us now, compared to where we were several years ago, we really have opened up the world of opportunities for our students and faculty. We’ve built a broad portfolio that everyone can take advantage of,” Vaughn says.

Leveraging Accreditation to Push Internationalization

The current structure of UT’s international programming has been in development since the mid-1990s, when under President Vaughn’s leadership, the university made internationalization a strategic priority. By 2005 those early efforts became the foundation for UT’s QEP, according to Marca Marie Bear, PhD, associate dean of the International Programs Office (IPO) and associate professor of management and international business at the Sykes College of Business.

“We were able to leverage the QEP and build internationalization into the vision that President Vaughn had for the university,” she says.

As the center for international programs of all kinds, the IPO oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, and on-campus global programming. A sampling of its portfolio includes semester abroad, travel courses, international internships, service learning, research and athletics abroad, immigration advising, and advising for postgraduate opportunities abroad.

The office provides comprehensive support for any university-sponsored activity abroad, ranging from predeparture orientations to assistance with logistics and health insurance. The IPO also sponsors more than 50 international events each academic year, including its Global Scholar Speakers Series, and publishes World View, an annual magazine showcasing the institution’s international initiatives.

A number of other initiatives came out of the first QEP, including funding for faculty to explore international issues. Annually, the Office of International Programs sponsors five to six faculty members to participate in International Faculty Development Seminars (IFDS) organized by the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE).

Celebrating Global Competence with a Certificate of International Studies

Another achievement of the QEP was the development of UT’s Certificate of International Studies (CIS). According to Bear, approximately 40–50 students are working toward the certificate at any given time.

Students must obtain intermediate foreign language proficiency, participate in education abroad, and complete five global engagement projects. Students are also required to take 12–16 credits in non-Western and global awareness courses and complete a capstone course. Students are recognized at graduation with a cord of distinction.

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Victoria Tully, a 2016 graduate, majored in international and cultural studies and completed the CIS. “The certificate allowed me to get involved on campus. You do internationally based projects and events,” says Tully, who studied abroad in both Spain and Brazil and is currently serving in the Peace Corps.

One of the ways the Office of International Programs encourages students completing the CIS is to get involved with Spartans Abroad Ambassadors, which helps build awareness of education abroad options throughout campus. “As a Spartans Abroad ambassador, I have been able to help other students in going abroad by sharing my experience,” Tully says.

Creating a Study Abroad Pipeline Through Early Global Experiences

In 2016 UT launched a new QEP, Learning by Doing, which focuses on experiential learning. Bear says the new QEP will have increased focus on international internships and service learning. Provost David Stern adds that it will also create an impetus to develop opportunities for undergraduate research abroad.

One recent initiative that bridges the two QEPs is the creation of a four-year study abroad pipeline beginning with opportunities for freshmen to go abroad during—or even before—their first year. Two groups of first-year students will have the opportunity to spend the second semester of their freshman year in Ireland or Spain. In August 2016 UT will also launch Spartans Academy Abroad, a summer pre-enrollment program in Costa Rica aimed at incoming freshmen.

Working through the admissions office, UT has leveraged the programs to attract highly qualified incoming freshmen that they expect to become “repeat participants,” as Stern puts it, when it comes to international engagement. The idea is to expose students to international experiences early in their college careers in order to maximize impact.

For the Costa Rica program, UT has partnered with the Monteverde Institute to offer eight credits in biology and social science to approximately 20 students. Biologist Mason Meers and political scientist Kevin Fridy will teach a two-week multidisciplinary course that focuses on environmental politics, conservation, sustainability, and biological diversity. Upon return, the students will study 
together in a freshman learning community for the rest of the year.

Fridy says that the program will also give students a chance to engage with research early on in their college careers. “We hope we can encourage them to become not only more international, but also more scholarly,” he says.

Exploration Through Inspiration in the Honors Program

Recruiting for Spartans Academy Abroad has been done in close collaboration with the UT Honors Program. According to Director Gary Luter, some 1,300 students are enrolled in the honors program, which requires a 3.5 GPA.

“One of the pillars of our mission statement is to prepare honors students to be global citizens,” Luter says.

To achieve this goal, UT offers a number of honors travel courses with a research element. It also provides travel scholarships of approximately $1,000 to 20 honors students each year to help them go abroad. One student a year is also awarded $2,500 through the Timothy M. Smith Inspiration Through Exploration Award.

“This is a unique experience where students create their own itinerary. They have their own objectives and we underwrite the cost,” Luter says.

The UT Honors Program also sends three students per semester to study at Oxford University in the United Kingdom, covering the cost of tuition and housing.

Last year Selene San Felice, a junior journalism major, took part in the program, which is run on a tutorial system where students work one-on-one with a professor. She says it gave her a chance to study underground rap and hip hop and the history of sexuality in the twentieth century.

“I got to do really intense academic work. I wrote between 10 and 12 research papers during the eight weeks I was there. It’s not the typical study abroad, but it was really rewarding,” she says.

Promoting Sportsmanship Abroad

UT tries to make international opportunities available for all students, regardless of major. For student athletes, fitting study abroad into training schedules can be a particular challenge.

“Athletes don’t get the opportunity to study abroad like most students do because they can’t leave for the entire semester. We think it’s important that the coaches take them abroad and expose them to other cultures,” says Larry Marfise, UT athletic director.

The UT Spartans play in Division II for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) with eight men’s and 11 women’s varsity sports. The NCAA allows teams to go on international trips every four years, an opportunity of which Marfise tries to take full advantage.

Marfise adds that increased cultural awareness is not the only benefit of sending his teams abroad. “Every single team that has gone has not only come back with a better appreciation for what goes on in this world, but they also come back as better teammates,” he says.

In recent years, he sent the UT volleyball team to Sweden and both men’s and women’s soccer teams to Germany. In January 2014 they also sent the UT baseball team to Cuba, where they participated in cultural exchange activities and played—and won—three exhibition games with minor league Cuban teams.

Fostering Cultural Connections with Cuba

The baseball team playing in Havana isn’t the only recent connection between the University of Tampa and Cuba. For more than five years, UT has participated in a number of educational, cultural, and artistic exchanges with various Cuban institutions. In March 2016, for example, UT’s Scarfone Hartley Gallery hosted an exhibition of contemporary Cuban art that was visited by more than 2,000 community members.

UT has also participated in two different educational delegations to Cuba in the last year. In October 2015 UT was part of a group of 12 U.S. higher education institutions selected to travel to Cuba as part of an Institute of International Education (IIE) initiative to increase the number of partnerships between the United States and Cuba.

Through its Global Access Partnership, coordinated through the Sykes College of Business, UT also ran its own travel program in March 2016 designed to provide a platform for university faculty and community partners to understand business opportunities in Cuba. President Vaughn led the delegation.

In addition, UT has been deepening its own partnerships with Cuban institutions. In April, UT and the University of South Florida (USF) hosted the first UT-USF International Conference on José Martí, a nineteenth-century political activist and man of letters who was instrumental in the Cuban fight for independence from Spain.

During the conference, UT was inaugurated as the first U.S. affiliate of the Center for José Martí Studies (Centro de Estudios Martianos), a research institution in Havana that promotes Martí’s work.

Professors Denis Rey and James Lopez have taken the lead in establishing the academic partnership between the two institutions. They have been leading travel courses to Cuba since 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama lifted restrictions for educational travel.

Rey and Lopez currently offer an honors course, Cuba and the U.S.: Then and Now, which examines U.S.-Cuba relations throughout the twentieth century. Rey says that his students have the opportunity to visit the Center for José Martí Studies. “What’s unique about our course is it’s one of very limited opportunities that U.S. students have to hear the Cuban perspective,” he explains.

Rey adds that the relationship with the Center for José Martí Studies has been instrumental in closely linking UT with a wider network of Cuban institutions. “In regards to the University of Havana, there exists mutual interest in fostering greater ties between the two institutions,” he says.

Senior Benjamin White traveled to Cuba with Rey and Lopez in January 2013. “Cuba is a nation that not many Americans have had the opportunity of visiting. It was a very good experience to have another perspective. It adds a layer to your thinking and analysis, and an understanding of the complexity of the negotiations that are occurring right now,” he says.

Academic Excellence Abroad Through Travel Courses

UT’s education abroad portfolio promotes opportunities for approximately 500 UT participants per year. One of the main ways that UT has sought to expand its education abroad portfolio is through the development of travel courses, which include an on-campus component followed by a faculty-led experience abroad. UT currently offers 17–20 travel courses to approximately 19 countries in a variety of disciplines.

Faculty members are provided with a stipend on top of their teaching salary. “It is a symbol that we recognize the value that they’re adding,” Stern says.

French Professor James Aubry leads a travel course to France every year. His course, Paris, Study of a City Throughout its History, explores the history of the French capital with a focus on lesser known landmarks.

Students who participate in the course are required to take at least two semesters of French prior to traveling. “When it comes to the language, I make them participate in everything from purchasing subway tickets for the group to ordering meals in French,” he says.

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Aubry appreciates that UT allows him to run the program with a small group of five to six students. “The students get more out of the experience,” he says.

Professor Tressa Pedroff leads a travel course to Costa Rica for nursing and public health students. The course, Transcultural Healthcare in Latin America, covers concepts such as community health promotion and disease prevention.

Pedroff says the course is an opportunity for future health care providers to understand their own medical system in a comparative context: “It’s a way of becoming much more culturally aware. It makes them have a new appreciation for other cultures and the resources that they have here in the United States.”

The Sykes College of Business also offers a range of travel courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. Business Professor Julia Pennington leads a travel course in qualitative market research to Swaziland in Africa. Her students visit game parks and interview local residents about their views on rhino conservation. “What I found out in my teaching is that qualitative research in study abroad is fantastic because you really have to connect with the locals,” she says.

Sykes also offers travel courses that look at international markets for graduate students. Amy Beekman, director of graduate business programs, says that it’s harder for graduate students to spend a semester away, so travel courses are an attractive option.

“Our international travel courses are a combination of business programs and cultural excursions, and they do projects for companies that we visit,” she says.

For their executive MBA program, Beekman recently led a 10-day trip to Ireland where students consulted for high-tech companies at a business incubator in Dublin. The students spent a few days on site with the company and then worked virtually after returning home.

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“Particularly in the executive MBA program, it’s all about the application. Our students already have a lot of professional experience. It’s a great learning experience for our students to be able to take everything they’ve learned in the program and to be able to apply it. Then you have the cultural dimension on top of it,” Beekman says.

Using Diversity as a Recruitment Tool

Over the last decade, the University of Tampa has increased not only its total enrollment but also the share of international students on campus. Total enrollment has increased from around 5,000 students in 2005 to nearly 8,000 in 2015, with the percentage of international students growing from approximately 9 percent to 20 percent during the same period.

When Vice President for Enrollment Dennis Nostrand came on board eight years ago, he couldn’t help but notice just how internationalized the campus had become. “I felt that it was something from a marketing standpoint that I really needed to take advantage of, and make sure that students that were going to come to the University of Tampa realized how internationally diverse the student body was,” he says.

To help attract international students, Nostrand created a bridge program with an English as a Second Language (ESL) provider. It is unique because it only enrolls students who plan to matriculate into UT once they achieve English proficiency, thus building a strong enrollment pipeline.

UT’s success in internationalization has also become one of its major selling points. “We want to make sure that students really understand the advantages of having an international campus,” he says.

With seven campuses in four countries, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) gives “global” an entirely new meaning. In addition to its presence around the world, NYIT boasts an exceptionally diverse student body, with nearly 20 percent of its students coming from more than 100 countries. The global perspective, as President Edward Guiliano is fond of saying, is infused into the institutional DNA.

NYIT’s high-tech environment also means that its global campuses in Nanjing, Beijing, Vancouver, and Abu Dhabi are just a few clicks away through state-of-the-art video conferencing that allows students to create and collaborate with their counterparts on the other NYIT campuses.

Developing a Global Network

Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Rahmat Shoureshi describes NYIT as a high-tech global network. “We have live connections in all of these places, and our students, as well as faculty, can benefit from all of the expertise we have distributed around our network,” he says.

Eschewing the branch campus model, NYIT campuses worldwide follow the same curriculum and are held to the same academic standards. All admissions decisions also go through the Old Westbury campus on Long Island. As Guiliano puts it, “We are one university and offer one curriculum and one degree.”

NYIT also encourages student and faculty mobility between campuses. Students from NYIT-Nanjing, for example, spend their senior year in New York. Shoureshi’s office will also provide travel scholarships for any NYIT student who wants to spend a semester at one of the global campuses. Faculty who propose research that requires collaboration with other campuses receive priority in allocation of research grants.

The first NYIT global program began in China in 1998; the oldest global campus, NYIT-Abu Dhabi, was founded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2005 as the first licensed and accredited American university in the UAE capital. NYIT-Nanjing opened its doors two years later, followed by NYIT-Vancouver in 2009. Most recently, NYIT opened a second campus in China in collaboration with the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing. NYIT has also just opened a new medical school campus on the grounds of Arkansas State University, in a region of the United States where many people lack access to healthcare.

NYIT also offers a number of dual-degree bachelor’s and master’s programs. With Centro Universitário da FEI in São Paulo, Brazilian students in engineering spend two and a half years at FEI, then come to New York for one and a half years, and then return to Brazil for their final year. NYIT also has degree partnerships with more than half a dozen Chinese universities, as well as with institutions in Brazil, France, India, Mexico, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Creating a Positive Experience for International Students

The presence of more than 2,500 international students on the main New York campuses in Manhattan and at Old Westbury on Long Island helps bring the world to NYIT.

Amanjeet Singh, an engineering major from India, feels like NYIT effectively bridges the gap between domestic and international students. He has done his part to help international students integrate into life at NYIT as an international student ambassador, a program managed by the Office of International Education.

“I take care of the freshmen students that come from India or other parts of the world. We have different events and programs so that people can get involved,” he says.

To ensure a positive experience for all international students, the institution convened an international student task force consisting of around 30 faculty and staff in Manhattan and Long Island in 2014–2015. They explored four areas: education, housing and food, jobs and career services, and customer service.

As a result, NYIT created workshops to help faculty and staff understand the challenges international students face, added a range of cultural foods in the dining halls, created on-campus job opportunities, and worked with units across the institution to improve customer service to international students.

The Office of Campus Life also collaborates with the counseling and wellness services offices. For example, it invited in therapists who spoke other languages to help international students understand what counseling entailed, and subsequently saw an uptick in the number of international students seeking counseling services.

Student service, according to Ann Marie Klotz, dean of campus life for Manhattan, is the heart of the NYIT experience. “If I can’t help you, I’m literally going to walk with you to the next office and make sure you have what you need. I think that is the difference maker for a lot of our students,” she explains.

“This is a very special kind of place if you allow yourself to get immersed in the life of students. It doesn’t feel overwhelming. It feels like an overwhelming privilege.”

Preparing Global Professionals

One of the core elements of an NYIT education is to prepare students to enter the job market upon graduation. President Guiliano says that NYIT fosters global competency by providing students with real-world experience and exposure to industry as well as opportunities to work with teams around the world. “Global competency means that work experience, connectivity, and collaboration are really part of what we do in the curriculum.”

Under the rubric of career services, Amy Bravo, assistant dean, oversees experiential education, internships, and service learning. Her office also coordinates job fairs and organizes mock interviews and networking opportunities.

They take special care to ensure that international students are also able to take advantage of opportunities to gain professional skills while still complying with immigration requirements.

Bravo created a number of alternative opportunities for international students to get practical experience. One such initiative is Consultants for the Public Good, which allows all students to work together on projects such as designing a multimedia art gallery for a school cafeteria.

“The idea is to get students to work in teams on community-based projects as opposed to signing up for a volunteer opportunity one time,” Bravo says.

Her office also oversees on-campus employment for both New York campuses. A few years ago, it created a job lottery for student employment, and several positions were earmarked specifically to international students, she says.

Localizing a Global Curriculum

The curriculum remains the same at each campus, but the content of courses can be adapted to the local context. “If students are taking a course in finance in New York, maybe the examples or the case studies are more focused on the types of investments, stocks, and so forth. The same class in Abu Dhabi follows the same curriculum. But the case studies will be on Islamic finance rather than on the stock market,” Shoureshi says.

Harriet Arnone, vice president for planning and assessment, explains it in terms of learning outcomes: “We have to guarantee consistency in learning outcomes across campuses....However, to be relevant to different cultures, particularly as we are so career-oriented, we allow faculty at different locations to add learning outcomes to courses… that reflect the environment...in which graduates will be working.”

NYIT is in the process of developing an occupational therapy program in Vancouver, British Columbia, which must be approved by the Canadian National Organization of Occupational Therapists. Jerry Balentine, DO, vice president for medical affairs and global health, says that as a result, students in the occupational health program in New York will be exposed to more information about the Canadian health care system.

Boosting Student Mobility

Education abroad at NYIT is housed in the Center for Global Academic Exchange, headed by Julie Fratrik. In addition to coordinating services for inbound international students coming to New York from exchanges or other NYIT campuses, her office also offers education abroad advising for outbound domestic students. In 2014–2015, 183 NYIT students participated in education abroad.

Kayla Ho, an American electrical and computer engineering major, spent spring 2015 at NYIT-Nanjing. Her family roots are in China, and she says the experience allowed her to learn more about her heritage as well as about her field of study.

“The chance to go to Nanjing was incredible.... Since it opened its doors, China has been developing technology at an astounding rate; there are new technologies and technology companies being created every day,” she says.

Eriana Burdan, a junior communication arts major, attended one of NYIT’s summer programs with its partner in Paris, École des Nouveaux Métiers de la Communication (EFAP). She took a course in documentary filmmaking that gave her a new perspective on her future media career.

She says it made her think about other career options in her field: “It made me realize that I was pigeonholing myself. There are so many more opportunities in and outside of the United States. It expanded the scope of what I could do with my major.”

Creating Alternative Opportunities to Travel the World

Beyond traditional study abroad, NYIT offers a number of noncredit opportunities for students to travel. Since 2014, President Guiliano has spearheaded Presidential Global Fellowships, which offers awards for NYIT students to engage in research projects, attend global conferences and symposiums, study abroad at another university, or do an internship at international nonprofit organizations.

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Guiliano says the goal is to help students have “transformational experiences” at least 200 miles from students’ home campuses. Since the program’s inception, more than 50 students have received awards.

Usman Aslam is a second-year medical student who received a Presidential Global Fellowship in 2015 to travel to Guayaquil, Ecuador, to spend a week working at a mobile cataract surgery clinic, where he was part of a team that performed 128 cataract surgeries. He received $2,500 to cover the cost of his airfare and lodging.

Aslam says that the fellowship was instrumental in his ability to travel. “A grant like this allows us to expand our training, our experiences, and helps mold our understanding of what we want to go into. The fellowship provided me with funding to broaden my perspective on medicine,” he says.

In addition to providing funding for students to create their own “transformative experiences,” NYIT also offers a number of service-learning opportunities abroad. For example, the Office of Career Services organizes an alternative spring break that enabled junior Anthony Holloway to travel to Rivas, Nicaragua, with nine other students to work on a project aimed at improving water quality in the community.

“I had never left the country before,” says Holloway, an interdisciplinary studies major.

Internationalizing the Disciplines

At its New York campuses, NYIT has seven schools and colleges with more than 90 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. Schools have a variety of faculty-led programs abroad, opportunities to engage with international issues in the classroom, and programs for international students.

The School of Management, for instance, offers four study abroad programs to Costa Rica, India, the Netherlands, and Germany. Students can also do summer internships at destinations around the world.

Every summer, Associate Dean Robert Koenig runs a 27-day business program in New York for 20 students from Hallym University in South Korea. Students take English language and business leadership courses in the morning, and spend afternoons touring business and cultural sites in New York City.

Koenig received the 2015 President’s Award for Student Engagement in Global Education, given to faculty and staff who have made major contributions in the area of global education. His Korea program has been so successful that the School of Management will be launching a similar program next summer with the Tourism College of Zhejiang in Hangzhou, China.

The School of Architecture and Design also has a wide variety of study abroad options for its students. It runs three to four short-term study abroad programs every year, usually in the summer. Approximately 24–40 students participate in these programs per year.

Assistant Professor Farzana Gandhi has worked with a group of students to redesign beach architecture in Puerto Rico and led a program to India that examined the need for affordable mass housing. Many of her courses are focused on social impact design and seek socially and environmentally conscious solutions to global problems such as mass migration, disaster relief, and climate change.

Gandhi says that study abroad has helped her students see their professional practice in a new light: “They have an appreciation for the end user in a much more thorough way.”

From 2012–2014, Gandhi’s students were involved in the Home2O Project, research that led to the development of a roofing system made of recycled plastic bottles and shipping pallets, which has subsequently been patented. Starting with locations like Haiti, they were seeking to develop a kit-of-parts system that could be deployed very quickly at disaster sites in subtropical climates.

NYIT has also provided support for faculty to pursue international research. School of Architecture and Design Associate Professor Charles Matz, who is also director of NYIT’s Center for Data Visualization, received an institutional grant that allowed him to work with the Ethiopian government and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to laser scan heritage sites.

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He has also worked on a number of joint programs with international partners in countries such as Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Iceland. Matz says that international programs allow students to understand the global standard for the architecture profession.

“Students realize that what they’re doing here is exactly what other people in their situation are dealing with abroad. Their work and its seriousness ramps up because they realize they’re dealing with global issues,” he says.

As vice president for medical affairs and global health, Balentine directs NYIT’s Center for Global Health. “The Center for Global Health really teaches our students about other countries and health care needs there and how to deliver it,” he says.

Through the Center for Global Health, medical students and students in the health professions can pursue a global health certificate. In addition to core courses, students do global health fieldwork, a 2–4 week program where students deliver health care services in countries such as Haiti and Ghana. They also complete an independent research project on global health under faculty supervision.

Balentine says the goal of the certificate is much broader than just getting students to go abroad. “From a teacher’s point of view, the real value is that even if these students never again leave the U.S. to practice medicine, the experience, the difference in health care that they see, the difference in living, the difference in cultures that they see, makes them better physicians back home,” he explains.

NYIT’s College of Osteopathic Medicine also offers a unique Émigré Physicians Program, which each year enrolls approximately 30 students who were trained physicians in their home countries. It’s one of the few programs of its kind in the United States.

Paving the Way to the Future

In 2015 the institution launched a new long-term strategic plan, known as NYIT 2030 version 2.0. According to Arnone, “When the plan was first published in 2006 the emphasis was on NYIT’s footprint and its additional locations overseas. In the revised plan, the language of the relevant goal now focuses on the global impact of an NYIT education; correspondingly, the priority initiative in support of this goal focuses on increasing opportunities for deep engagement across cultures.”
 

As an ecologist studying vector-borne diseases, Courtney Murdock had long been interested in conducting research in Brazil, which made headlines around the world in 2015 due to the Zika virus epidemic. Her opportunity to travel to Brazil came in 2016 due to an innovative partnership between the University of Georgia (UGA), where Murdock is an assistant professor, and the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After participating in a university-sponsored faculty workshop designed to foster research collaboration with several Brazilian institutions, Murdock and faculty from Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) received a $15,000 seed grant. The project, which will include the training of Brazilian and U.S. PhD students, explores how temperature variations affect the mosquito-Zika virus interaction. 

Murdock’s grant was part of UGA’s strategic, data-driven approach to building international partnerships in Brazil. UGA has combined targeted use of incentive funding with facilitated faculty mobility to enhance research collaboration with five institutions in Minas Gerais. The partnership aims to not only strengthen faculty involvement in campus internationalization, but also focus resources on complementary research areas. 

Balancing Individual Initiative and Centralized Coordination

As a comprehensive land- and sea-grant institution made up of 17 schools and colleges, UGA faces many of the same challenges that other large public universities encounter when it comes to international research collaboration. Many areas of the university are actively engaged in international research, but opportunities for synergies are often lost. While centralized coordination is essential, collaborative research is ultimately driven by the faculty. 

“Particularly if you move beyond student mobility, you have this challenge of relying on individual faculty initiative to generate lasting research and service interactions,” says Brian Watkins, director for international partnerships. When Noel Fallows became the associate provost for international education and senior international officer in 2016, he wanted to address this issue by strengthening the role of the UGA Office of International Education in establishing research partnerships. “I wanted to position the international office as a major nexus for international research on campus,” he says. 

Fallows and Watkins worked together to pinpoint where they wanted to focus their efforts. “We wanted to figure out where in the world we have an existing critical mass of relationships where there is also potential for further collaboration in priority research areas,” Watkins says.  

Using Data Analysis to Identify Strategic Partners

Using an internal faculty database and Clarivate Analytics’s InCites platform, Watkins performed a bibliometric analysis to identify the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais as a region where UGA already had substantial engagement. While the university had always viewed Brazil as a strategically important partner, the analysis showed that an outsized portion of UGA’s collaborations in Brazil could be traced to several institutions in Minas Gerais. Furthermore, there was significant overlap in several priority areas—such as human and animal health, life sciences, agriculture, and environmental sciences—that suggested possibilities for future research collaboration.

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One of the outcomes of Watkins’s analysis was the UGA-Minas Gerais Joint Research Accelerator, which offers a four-year, $240,000 seed grant program in collaboration with the Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development (FAPEMIG). UGA quickly established, or refocused, institutional partnerships with three universities in that region that had overlapping strengths across one or more strategic research areas. 

The next step was to bring faculty from UGA together with their Brazilian counterparts for a two-day faculty workshop in Tiradentes, Brazil. The UGA Office of the Provost and the Office of Research, among other units on campus, provided financial support for the workshop. Twenty-four participants were tasked with developing new joint research proposals to be presented to their peers. Faculty developed 12 new joint research proposals, half of which were refined into applications for the UGA-FAPEMIG seed funding program, and two of which were ultimately selected for funding.

Planting the Seeds for Future Collaboration

Murdock expects that the seed funding she, her UGA colleague Melinda Brindley, and their Brazilian collaborators received from UGA-FAPEMIG will lead to larger external grant opportunities. The initial investment will result in two or three collaborative publications, and the preliminary data from the project will form the backbone of a National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01) application.

“In order to successfully obtain funding for large-scale international collaborations, teams need to be in place with a sufficient track record of research,” Murdock says. “This is incredibly difficult to initially set up without seed grant opportunities. Initiatives such as this one [are] hugely helpful in facilitating the formation of these international teams and building the groundwork for future, larger-scale research collaborations.” 

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The seed funding was not limited to faculty who participated in the workshop in Tiradentes. UGA linguistics professor Pilar Chamorro Fernandez and Fabio Bonfim Duarte, a linguist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), received funding to build on their previous work on indigenous languages in Brazil. “Given that these languages are normally in remote areas, we need funding to do this kind of research,” Fernandez says. “It’s made me feel like the research we do as linguists has finally been acknowledged.”

The project has also created opportunities for graduate student research on both sides. Brazilian graduate students from UFMG worked with Fernandez and Duarte to document endangered languages in Brazil’s Tenetehara communities. Three graduate students at UGA will begin working on the project in fall 2018. 

In addition to the institutional relationships built upon the seed funding, UGA has developed strong ties to Minas Gerais through its Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI). LACSI is a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. According to LACSI Director Richard Gordon, they were able to use NRC funds to help support the partnership between FAPEMIG and UGA. 

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LACSI hosts the Portuguese Flagship program, the only Flagship program in the United States that is dedicated to Portuguese. The Flagship is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Education program, with the goal of teaching critical languages to undergraduate students. UGA expects that the Portuguese Flagship program, and its close partnership with the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ), will eventually lead to increased student and faculty mobility as well as joint research. 

A Model for Engagement Around the World

The UGA-Minas Gerais partnership serves as a model for joint research collaboration in other regions. Watkins cautions, however, that the approach is not applicable in all countries. “It’s a compelling model to follow in terms of building out research collaboration with peers abroad, but it presupposes a group of partners in geographic proximity where there are congruent research interests and capacity,” he says.  

Watkins says that while seed funding is not unique, what is innovative is the combination of data-driven analysis and faculty incentives. “We use the available data to target seed funding and combine both of those with face-to-face meetings to generate organic yet directed faculty interest,” he says. 

UGA will be utilizing the same data-driven approach in its engagement in other world regions, particularly in China. “We view the UGA-Minas model as an essential first step in projecting a physical presence that builds [the] institution’s international profile and leads to additional research and student mobility opportunities in a way not otherwise possible through ad hoc collaborations,” Watkins says.

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University of Georgia

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When Caitlyn Wessels traveled to Zambia with her fellow classmates from Baldwin Wallace University (BW), she wasn’t just going abroad—she was going home. A native Zambian, Wessels is a student enrolled in BW’s master’s of science in speech-language pathology program, one of the first programs of its kind in the United States to require an international experience. 

“I really enjoyed showing my classmates my home,” says Wessels, who was part of the second cohort of BW speech-language pathology graduate students to participate in a two-week study abroad program to Zambia. Wessels, who received a full-ride scholarship from Baldwin Wallace, and 20 classmates provided speech and language services in cooperation with Zambian community partners. 

A Mission of Creating Compassionate Citizens

In 1845, local entrepreneur John Baldwin founded the institution that would later become Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. As one of the first higher education institutions in the United States to admit students without regard to race or gender, the institution has written into its mission the goal of “creating contributing, compassionate citizens of an increasingly global society.” BW has built its global education programs on this foundation rooted in social justice. 

“Although we are a small school, we are always looking for ways to make a much bigger difference in the world than our size would suggest,” says Provost Stephen Stahl. 

One such opportunity was the development of the master’s degree program in speech-language pathology, a new graduate program in the School of Health Sciences that was launched in 2016. Dean Colleen Visconti and professor Christie Needham knew they wanted to incorporate an international component when they began designing the curriculum for the fivesemester program. 

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“We knew one of the best ways to support our program’s goal of developing culturally responsive service providers was to go abroad and be able to come back and see the world in a different light,” says Visconti. With 38 percent of its students eligible for Pell grants, BW administrators were deliberate in making sure that the program was affordable. “We were able to build the trip abroad into the cost structure and, in doing so, make it accessible and intrinsically sustainable,” Stahl says. 

Building Sustainable Links

Needham reached out to Chisomo Selemani, a former BW student and a Zambian speech pathologist, about developing and coordinating the program. Less than a year later, Selemani joined BW as an assistant professor and program coordinator, drawing on her own professional contacts and experience in Zambia to develop course content and the service-oriented study abroad program. 

The institution initially sent teams of faculty and administrators to Zambia on a series of exploratory trips to build relationships with community partners and government representatives, including a meeting with the First Lady of Zambia Esther Lungu. In addition, BW played host to Alfred Mwamba, director of the Starkey Hearing Institute in Zambia, on its campus in Ohio. Mwamba was a guest lecturer in undergraduate and graduate communication disorders courses, and he later received BW students at his institute in Lusaka where they had the chance to interact with Zambian audiology students. BW faculty have also provided ongoing long-distance mentorship and professional development opportunities for Zambian practitioners who work with people with complex communication needs. These efforts have expanded to supporting professionals in other industries.

Providing scholarships to talented Zambian students such as Wessels is a part of BW’s reciprocal approach. Once Wessels graduates and returns to Zambia, she will help run the program there. BW plans to recruit and sponsor one Zambian student for every BW speech-language pathology cohort, with the eventual goal of expanding scholarship opportunities to other health sciences. “Having Zambian students on campus [in Ohio] also helps provide international opportunities for our students, as well as builds capacity in Zambia,” Selemani explains. 

Christie Shrefler, director of BW’s Explorations/Study Abroad Center, says the university has consciously focused on capacity building and meeting local needs. “The organizations that we’re working with have expressed very specific needs. We’re not displacing people; we’re bringing in technology and skills that aren’t currently available,” she says. 

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Developing Clinical Skills Through International Service

At the end of their second semester in the program and an extensive predeparture orientation, the speech- language pathology master’s students spend two weeks in Zambia. The focus in country is on clinical education activities and cultural exchange. The students also visit local sites, such as Victoria Falls, and network with professionals and students in other disciplines during dinnertime sessions to learn more about Zambian culture and business practices in industries such as fashion, media, graphic design, audiology, and community development.

Students partake in a variety of service opportunities that have been developed collaboratively with Zambian community partners. For example, several BW students were placed at a preschool program that requested help with screening children for communication disorders. Other BW students helped to train primary school teachers in language activities they can perform in their classrooms. “These service opportunities provide our students with not only clinical experiences, but also with opportunities to be immersed in cultural experiences that are completely different from their own,” says Selemani. 

Marissa LaVigna, who graduated in May 2018, was part of the first cohort of BW students to travel to Zambia in 2017. She provided push-in services, which refers to therapy delivered in the school context, for children ranging from the kindergarten level through the eighth grade, and she administered informal speechlanguage evaluations to children with disabilities such as cerebral palsy. “Professionally speaking, service in Zambia has made me a stronger clinician. We learned, in the moment, how to adjust our therapy styles and provide effective therapy with a minimal amount of materials,” LaVigna says. 

Needham adds that the students gain valuable experience that they will be able to draw on in the future. “A really powerful thing about this program is that it’s really based on giving our students an opportunity to learn how to listen to someone. Because sometimes we may think they need something but [their true needs] may be very different. That is something that they can use clinically for the rest of their careers,” she says. 

Creating a Culture of Internationalization

Baldwin Wallace’s engagement in Zambia has gone beyond the initial international program for speechlanguage pathology students to developing bidirectional relationships that have led to opportunities for faculty in other disciplines. According to Shrefler, approximately 15 faculty and staff have been able to travel to Zambia through the exploratory trips, which has helped shift the campus culture and dialogue on internationalization. 

Duane Battle, an assistant professor who teaches communications and broadcast journalism, will colead BW’s first undergraduate study abroad program to Zambia in 2019. He traveled to Lusaka in May 2016 with BW’s first faculty and staff delegation to create films documenting the exploratory trip. 

Building on the contacts he made during the 2016 trip, Battle and theater professor Scott Plate will take a group of theater and journalism students to Zambia in 2019. Together, they will work with Barefeet Theater, a nongovernmental organization and street theater company that serves vulnerable children through the arts. 

For Battle, BW’s engagement in Zambia has been a transformative experience, both personally and professionally. “I’ve gone from someone who has never traveled abroad to helping lead a group of students abroad next year,” he says. “It’s tremendous for me as an educator to help them on their journey and expose them to something I wasn’t exposed to at their age.”

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Baldwin Wallace University

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As one of the country’s largest comprehensive research institutions, the University of Florida (UF) not only attracts talented international students and scholars, but it also leverages its research strengths in areas such as agriculture and public health to collaborate with partners around the world.

“By our very nature as a land-grant and comprehensive research university, we’ve always had a lot of international activity,” says Leonardo A. Villalón, dean of the UF International Center (UFIC). “But our international efforts were [historically] quite siloed and decentralized. What we’ve done over the last 15 years is to make a concentrated effort to find ways to share information and coordinate all of that international activity.” 

Founded in 1991, UFIC has played a pivotal role in promoting comprehensive internationalization to the more than 50,000 students, some 5,000 faculty, and 16 colleges that make up the large, highly decentralized institution. UFIC oversees core international services including study abroad, support for international students and scholars, and cooperative agreements and exchanges. UFIC also maintains a travel registry for faculty and has recently established a global research office to provide information to investigators interested in international studies.

Under UFIC’s leadership, the university has engaged in comprehensive internationalization for nearly 15 years. In 2004, the institution received a NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for its early efforts in assessing international engagement as well as improving in key areas such as international student enrollment and study abroad participation. 

Since winning the Spotlight Award, UF has reenvisioned its approach to internationalization, culminating in a quality enhancement plan (QEP) titled “Learning Without Borders: Internationalizing the Gator Nation,” which has served as the cornerstone of the university’s 2014 reaccreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). 

Pursuing Excellence Through Internationalization

UF’s pursuit of comprehensive internationalization has gone hand in hand with its quest to become the flagship institution in Florida and one of the top 10 public universities in the United States. 

“For the University of Florida to maintain its strong reputation, it’s important that we be perceived as a national and international university with international impact,” says Joseph Glover, provost and senior vice president of academic affairs. “We are trying to educate and bring the impact of our research to the rest of the world to contribute to the University of Florida’s global stature.” 

Provost Glover and President W. Kent Fuchs want to boost UF’s global reputation by attracting top international graduate students and scholars through the institution’s research profile. Such efforts to entice students and scholars include the introduction of in-state tuition for incoming Fulbright fellows and the offer of competitive stipends and benefits packages for talented international graduate students. 

Between 2006 and 2016, UF increased the number of enrolled international students by more than 50 percent, with the student body representing approximately 130 countries of origin. Taking into account the students on optional practical training, UF hosted more than 7,000 international students in fall 2016. The majority of the growth was among international graduate students, who make up approximately 87 percent of UF’s international students. The university has recently begun focusing more attention on growing its undergraduate enrollment, creating a dedicated undergraduate recruitment position in 2015.

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Fuchs says that the benefit of increasing UF’s international student population, both undergraduate and graduate, is twofold. “The education of students from the state of Florida is enriched by having other students from around the world,” he says. “If we’re going to raise the stature of the institution, we need to be even more known worldwide and having students from abroad is one way of doing that.” 

Partnering to Promote Interdisciplinary Research

According to Provost Glover, the university is increasingly engaged in large, interdisciplinary research projects that involve academic units across campus, ranging from the College of Medicine to the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “To find all of these capabilities on one campus is a very rare thing in the United States,” Glover says. “We are probably one of the very few universities that is set up to really address large issues [like public health in Africa] that you find in various hotspots around the world.” 

Fuchs adds that international research efforts are further supported by the Division of Global Compliance and Research Support in the UF Office of Research. “The research office has really redoubled its support for certain parts of the world that faculty are engaged in that don’t have the infrastructure that we would rely on when we’re there. The best example is Haiti,” Fuchs says.  
Several UF colleges and academic units have had longterm engagement in Haiti. For instance, the UF Center for Latin American Studies (LAS) has significant ties to Haiti and is one of the few institutions in the United States where students can study Haitian Creole. 

UF’s interdisciplinary Emerging Pathogens Institute (EPI) also has a major global research portfolio, with collaborations in more than 75 countries, reflecting the critical nature of international work in understanding how pathogens (such as Zika or Ebola) are transmitted and controlled. Given Haiti’s close proximity to Florida, EPI has placed a major focus on research in that country, with grant support from the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the European Union, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Researchers have taken advantage of the permanent UF/EPI laboratories located in Haiti and have performed work with a wide range of pathogens. 

Health studies in Haiti have been conducted in close collaboration with the School of Medicine at the Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH) (State University of Haiti). EPI and UF provided consultation to UEH on rebuilding the School of Medicine after it was destroyed during the 2010 earthquake. “We assisted with the design for the laboratories in the School of Medicine and have worked with them to set up functioning laboratories within the new building,” says Glenn Morris, EPI director and professor of medicine.

The University of Florida’s EPI and College of Medicine have been instrumental in the development of student and faculty exchange and educational programs linking the two universities. Water, which is a cornerstone of global health, has emerged as a major common interest. 

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Under the leadership of EPI and the UF Water Institute, UF cosponsored a two-day Water Summit with UEH in fall 2017. The summit brought together more than 200 experts from five different Haitian government ministries; academia, including UF graduate and undergraduate students; international agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United Nations Children’s Fund; nongovernmental organizations; and the commercial sector.    

The University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) has also been conducting research and community outreach in Haiti for more than 50 years. UF/IFAS is currently the lead institution on a new five-year project funded with a $13.7 million grant by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as part of the Feed the Future global hunger and food security initiative.   

Leveraging Accreditation to Promote Internationalization

The creation of the Learning Without Borders QEP provided an opportunity for UF to think creatively about how it approached internationalization. According to President Fuchs, the accreditation process and QEP allowed the university to focus programmatic efforts on creating international opportunities for undergraduates. This was achieved by establishing the Office of Undergraduate Academic Programs (UAP), housed within UFIC, to oversee the International Scholars program and an international studies major, among other initiatives. The UF administration committed more than $500,000 in additional funding per year for 5 years to support the implementation of the QEP.

Leading the implementation of the QEP are Matthew Jacobs, UAP director and history professor, and Paloma Rodríguez, UAP associate director. While some of the QEP funding is dedicated to diversifying study abroad offerings and supporting student scholarships, the majority of the investment is focused on internationalizing students’ experience on campus.

Rodríguez says that student learning is the focal point of the QEP. “This is a student-centered initiative, with internationalization at home at its very core,” she adds. “We have built internationalization around the students, not the programs or the faculty or the content. The QEP is called ‘Learning Without Borders.’ It’s the learning process that we curate every day.”

Jacobs says that internationalizing the undergraduate experience is often very narrowly conceived as education abroad. Over the past 7 years, nearly 22,000 UF students have studied abroad, representing an average of 4.5 percent of total full-time equivalent enrollment.

“We certainly want to do everything in our power to get more students going abroad. But the numbers tell us that even if we double our participation, that’s still only 10 percent of UF students abroad,” Jacobs says. “So when we think about internationalizing their experience, we’ve got to think about what we can do between Archer Road and University Avenue, between 13th Street and 34th Street—those are the boundaries of campus.”

The QEP’s signature program is the International Scholars program, a cocurricular program open to undergraduates from all majors. Around 500 students are currently enrolled in the program, and approximately 100 students have graduated with an international scholar distinction since the program launched in fall 2015.

Students are required to take 12 credits of approved courses with international content, participate in an international experience or take two semesters of a foreign language, and attend four international events on campus. The capstone requirement is the creation of an e-portfolio that features photography, reflections, research papers, and other content that show the ways in which students have been globally engaged. Students who enroll in the International Scholars program can simultaneously enroll in the UF Peace Corps Prep program.

Rodríguez has collaborated with career services staff to help guide students on how they can use their e-portfolios to demonstrate the skills they have learned to prospective employers. She works with the students to help them articulate the ways in which global engagement contributes to their employability.

Elle Gough is an international studies, anthropology, and French triple major who graduated in May 2018. Following a semester abroad in Lyon, France, she joined the International Scholars program as a way to structure her international experiences moving forward. She then became a peer adviser to encourage other students to consider study abroad and participated in a UF-sponsored summer program to India.

Gough says the e-portfolio allows her to bring everything together in a central location. “[The e-portfolio] gives me a running record of everything I’ve done,” she says. “It helps me retrace my own history, my own timeline of making my own experiences more international.”

Rodríguez says that the e-portfolios also allow staff to get a snapshot of the international work that students are doing. “It provides us a glimpse at what global engagement looks like for students at UF, so that now we can see how to take this to the next level,” she says. 

Promoting Internationalization Through Area Studies Centers

Building on UF’s strength as a comprehensive research university, the three Title VI National Resource Centers have been key players in the university’s comprehensive internationalization efforts. The UF Center for Latin American Studies (LAS), founded in 1930, is the oldest center in the United States that is focused on that region. The university created the Center for African Studies (CAS) in 1964, followed by the Center for European Studies (CES) in 2001. 

According to Philip Williams, director of Latin American studies, the centers have played a unique role in centralizing international activities on campus because they cut across disciplinary boundaries and engage faculty from all 16 colleges. For example, the Tropical Conservation & Development program, a graduate certificate program that focuses on the integration of conservation and poverty alleviation in the tropics, is the result of collaboration between LAS and CAS. 

The area studies centers use Title VI grants to develop new course offerings, provide start-up funding for study abroad, create research opportunities for students, and organize cultural events on campus. “We have close collaboration with UFIC in terms of developing the programs, seeding and promoting programs, and finding scholarship opportunities for students,” Williams says. “A lot of the academic and cultural programming related to these three regions, including training in critical languages or less commonly taught languages, comes through Title VI funding.”

Through all three centers, undergraduate and graduate students can receive Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships funded by the U.S. Department of State to study lesser and least commonly taught languages from Africa, Europe, and Latin America. The centers offer both summer language institutes for high school and university students and language immersion programs abroad. 

In addition to traditional study abroad programs, the area studies centers provide travel and research grants for faculty and students engaged in their respective regions. The Center for African Studies, for example, provides funding for undergraduates to accompany a faculty member abroad to conduct field research through the Research Tutorial Abroad program, a model that the Center for Latin American Studies is considering replicating. 

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In 2017, CAS sent four students to Ghana with a faculty member to document an endangered language. The center has also supported UF dance students who traveled to Guinea, where they studied with two national dance companies. 

Fostering Global Research Engagement for Faculty and Graduate Students

To help promote global research, UF established the Office for Global Research Engagement (OGRE) in 2015. The office serves as a centralized resource for faculty who want to conduct international research, and it offers a series of workshops on topics such as international partnership compliance and collaborating with an international team. In addition, OGRE staff provide feedback on grant proposals, help faculty develop budgets, and facilitate interdisciplinary knowledge networks based on shared geographic interests or topics such as global health. 

OGRE’s signature program is the Global Fellows program, which offers professional development workshops and travel grants for faculty. Every year, the office selects a cohort of 10 to 12 faculty members who are interested in doing research abroad. 

Biology professor and botanist Emily Sessa was part of the first cohort of Global Fellows in fall 2015. As a plant systematist, she focuses on the relationships between plants. Her international trips involve collecting plant samples from all over the world, which she then processes at her lab in Gainesville, Florida. 

As a Global Fellow, Sessa found the faculty workshops extremely helpful, partly because of the network she established across campus. “As a younger faculty member, it was a nice way to get to know faculty in other departments and colleges,” she says. 
Sessa also received a $4,000 travel grant, which she used to travel to Finland to visit with colleagues at the Finnish Museum of Natural History. As a result of her trip to Finland, she has published a paper and applied for a grant from the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Her travels also strengthened her application for the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Faculty Early Career Development program, which prioritizes international collaboration. 

“A lot has come from that funding. It’s been really good for me professionally to have that face time with my collaborators there. It’s nice to be at an institution that has so much support for internationalization,” Sessa says. 

In addition to providing support for faculty, OGRE coordinates funding for graduate students through the Research Abroad for Doctoral (RAD) students program. Advanced PhD candidates in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines can receive up to $10,000 to conduct research at an international laboratory or field site. Since the program’s inception in the 2015–16 academic year, RAD has bestowed 22 awards, totaling more than $120,000.

Zachary Emberts, a PhD candidate who focuses on entomology, used his funding to travel to Australia and Singapore to work with leading scientists in his field. He says this kind of support was essential when he was finishing his dissertation, considering the recent cuts to federal funding for doctoral students.  

“The funding environment right now is hard, especially for someone who has passed their candidacy. I would not have had the opportunity to go without this funding,” Emberts says. “It has already paid off in terms of my professional growth and development, but it will hopefully continue to pay off in terms of the research that has yet to come to fruition.”

Support for faculty and graduate student research abroad speaks to UF’s ongoing quest for excellence. “The findings are that when faculty collaborate on joint international publications, those articles are cited more often and they are submitted to higher impact journals,” says Julie Fesenmaier, OGRE associate director. “That benefits the university. It feeds into our mission of being a top research institution.” 

In May 2018, a delegation of senior administrators led by Lawrence Schovanec, president of Texas Tech University (TTU), arrived in Costa Rica with scissors in hand. They were there for the ribbon cutting ceremony at TTU’s first international degree-granting campus, Texas Tech University at Costa Rica (TTU-CR). The new campus, a public-private partnership between TTU and Costa Rican financial group Promerica Group, is one of the most visible examples of the ways in which TTU has expanded its portfolio beyond its main campus in Lubbock, Texas.

In the last 2 decades, TTU has transformed from a regional institution in west Texas to a top research institution with a global reach spanning from Costa Rica to Spain. TTU’s robust research portfolio and its international partnerships have helped propel the university’s recent Carnegie designation as one of 115 top tier research institutions—of which 81 are public institutions—in the United States. TTU’s research strengths include areas such as climate change; the interconnections of water, land, food, and fiber; computational and theoretical sciences; and energy. 

In addition to its physical presence around the world, the university currently serves 37,000 students—more than 3,000 of whom come from abroad—on its main campus. Internationalization has gone hand in hand with TTU’s quest to become, in the words of its first president Paul Whitfield Horn, an institution that thinks in “worldwide terms.”

“We’ve created a culture at Tech that covers the full gamut of international activities and initiatives,” Schovanec says. “It’s not just a matter of raising international student enrollment; it’s creating a community here on campus that’s supportive and appreciative of comprehensive internationalization of our education enterprise. It relates to research funding opportunities that have an international focus and opportunities for students to be involved in study abroad.”

Advancing TTU’s Global Vision With Strategy

The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is at the helm of TTU’s internationalization efforts. Under the leadership of Vice Provost for International Affairs Sukant Misra, OIA’s mission is to advance “the global vision of Texas Tech University by promoting international leadership, awareness, education, scholarship, and outreach for the university and the broader community.”

The unit oversees international recruitment, international undergraduate admissions, international student and scholar services, and study abroad. OIA is also responsible for international partnerships, research collaborations, and grants administration. The K–12 Global Education Outreach (K–12 GEO) initiative, which is part of OIA, won a NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for its outreach efforts in 2016. K–12 GEO works with local schools and classrooms to foster global awareness in the wider Lubbock community. OIA continues to find new ways to move the university’s internationalization strategy forward on and off campus.  After 25 years at TTU, in various positions, Misra became vice provost and senior international officer in January 2018. Prior to this role, he served for 4 years as associate vice provost of international programs under Tibor Nagy, a former ambassador to Ethiopia and Guinea who retired from TTU at the end of 2017 after a 14-year tenure. 

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As associate vice provost, Misra spearheaded the development of the 2015–2020 OIA Strategic Plan and preparation of annual strategic plan assessments, which fed into the university’s new strategic plan, “A Pathway to 2025.” The strategic planning process led to several university-wide goals, such as integrating global perspectives into the curriculum and furthering intercultural understanding in the community at large.  

TTU also launched a new quality enhancement plan (QEP) as part of its 2015 reaccreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The QEP, “Communicating in a Global Society,” focuses university-wide efforts on global communication and awareness. Led by the Office of the Provost, the QEP has provided additional funding to enhance undergraduate education in global communications through programing, educational activities, and scholarships.

Building a Globally Engaged Student Community

An area of strategic aim for TTU has been creating a globally engaged student community by recruiting, admitting, retaining, and graduating more international students. One of the first things Misra did as associate vice provost was to help transition international undergraduate admissions from the Graduate School to OIA, which has led to a more streamlined admissions process. 

TTU has always had a large international graduate student population, so many of the university’s recruitment efforts in the last few years have been centered on international undergraduates. The efforts have been fruitful; in the last 5 years, the number of international undergraduate students on the TTU campus has grown by more than 80 percent. According to President Schovanec, the number of international undergraduate students on campus exceeded the number of international graduate students for the first time in fall 2017. 

“We set out on the path to increase our [international] undergraduate enrollment very intentionally,” says Provost Michael Galyean. “We provided the appropriate staffing and defined what kinds of services we needed to offer. We made a commitment to serve those students once they got on campus.”

At the same time, the international graduate population grew by 18 percent. Now, more than one-quarter of all graduate students on campus are international.  

International students are primarily served by the International Student Life unit within OIA. This unit organizes orientation, welcome week events, and cultural programs, among other activities. Beth Mora, international student life coordinator, manages TTU’s international student orientation and other events throughout the academic year. “We help connect them to the Lubbock community, help connect them to the university, and help connect them to each other,” she says.

To help ease incoming international students’ transition to campus life, OIA partners with off-campus student apartments to provide incoming international students with a place to stay if they arrive in Lubbock before the campus residence halls open. Students are able to pay $5 per day for a “three-day stay.” “Many of our international students take advantage of both airport pickup and the three-day stay,” says Mora. 

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Dhanraj Apte, a graduate student from India studying industrial engineering, says he did not realize how much effort TTU puts into helping international students transition to life in Lubbock until he started working as a graduate assistant for OIA. “They have recognized the need to offer help and create[d] different resources for international students to make sure that we’re not having difficulties adjusting to U.S. culture,” he says. 

Promoting International Research to Advance Internationalization

Misra has also helped provide a renewed emphasis on international research and partnerships with the establishment of the International Research and Development (IRD) division of OIA in 2014. The unit, with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Office of Research Services, assists faculty from across campus to engage in international research and development activities. In addition to sending a monthly email that provides information about internal and external funding opportunities, IRD assists faculty with putting together grant proposals. 

“We have really ramped up our support for international research,” says Provost Galyean. “In the last 4 years, we’ve had a significant increase in not only the amount of funding we received, but also the number of proposals related to international research going out the door.” 

Biology professor Gad Perry, who also serves as senior director for international research and development, says his job is to help make international research collaboration as easy as possible for faculty by helping them identify funding opportunities and potential collaborators abroad. “We provide resources, information, and connections,” he says. “In doing so, hopefully we enhance the chance that they’ll do international research.”

Reagan Ribordy, director of international programs, says the IRD unit oversees a budget of $25,000 for international research seed grants. Approximately 10 faculty receive $2,000 grants per year to cover travel or other start-up costs, with the goal of eventually gaining external funding. Recent projects have included an investigation of young people’s communication via social media in Thailand and a pilot study on the antidiabetic properties of a medicinal plant found in Belize. 

According to Ribordy, TTU faculty have submitted more than $50 million worth of proposals since the IRD unit was established in 2014. Since then, the university has received approximately $4.8 million in external funding for international initiatives. These funds include a grant from the U.S. Department of State, which selected TTU to host 25 young African leaders through the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders in summer 2017. 

TTU is also developing strong relationships with partner institutions in countries such as Ethiopia and Brazil. For instance, Stephen Ekwaro-Osire, former associate dean of research and graduate programs in the Whitacre College of Engineering, is the principal investigator for a $1.1 million grant that supports the design and development of curriculum for four graduate programs in civil engineering and construction technology at Jimma University in southeastern Ethiopia. Additionally, the TTU Department of Human Development and Family Studies has collaborated with Jigjiga University in eastern Ethiopia to develop programs in nutrition and early childhood education. 

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In Brazil, TTU has partnered with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) since 2014 to fund joint research projects. TTU and FAPESP have successfully cosponsored three rounds of research proposals, with teams winning support for the exchange of faculty and postdoctoral researchers in each cycle. For example, two TTU faculty members, along with a researcher from the Federal University of São Paulo, received funding to examine the effects of toxic stress on children’s brain development using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. 

Another TTU initiative that promotes international undergraduate research is Research Study Abroad, a new program piloted by professor David Weindorf, a research faculty fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Research. Weindorf used funding from his endowed chair, the BL Allen Endowed Chair of Pedology, in the Department of Plant and Soil Science to fund student travel to countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. He is hoping to encourage other faculty to replicate the program.

Engaging in Community Outreach to Foster Individual Understanding

TTU views community outreach through its K–12 GEO program as a central pillar to its campus internationalization strategy, with a mission to “build a globally engaged community of learners through outreach opportunities that foster intercultural understanding and exchange while enriching the quality of life for both the universities and local communities across west Texas.”

Founded in 1997, K–12 GEO creates opportunities for more than 20,000 local students, teachers, and community members to learn about the world each year. By visiting local classrooms and inviting local students to the TTU campus, TTU faculty and staff help boost students’ awareness of other countries and cultures within a community where many young people do not have the opportunity to travel. K–12 GEO programs include an Ellis Island experience, workshops on holidays such as Chinese Lunar New Year and Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and activities celebrating the history of Ireland’s music and dance culture.  

In addition to the programming provided to local K–12 students, OIA hosts eight to 10 events featuring internationally recognized speakers and culturally diverse educational programs that are open to the larger Lubbock community. Particularly noteworthy is the annual Texas Tech Ambassadors Forum, which features a panel discussion by diplomatic and foreign policy experts. Other events include an annual German Christmas celebration called Weihnachten and Culture Fest 2017. In 2017, OIA worked with 17 international student groups to put on an outdoor festival that showcased cultural performers from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

“Today’s complex world requires international cooperation on multiple levels. TTU is committed to graduating a diverse and globally competent group of students who are prepared to face these challenges. Community outreach continues to play an integral part of this mission,” says Kelley Coleman, director of international enrollment development and outreach.

Growing Study Abroad and Extending Opportunities to Underrepresented Students

As part of the university’s internationalization strategy, TTU has recently focused on expanding the number of students who study abroad. In 2016–17, approximately 1,300 TTU students participated in credit-bearing programs abroad. The College of Architecture highly encourages, and the College of Engineering requires, an international experience for graduation, with other departments considering adding this requirement as well. The College of Arts and Sciences has a foursemester foreign language requirement, which many students fulfill abroad. The TTU Spanish program is especially popular. 

 With more than 27 percent of enrolled students identifying as Hispanic, TTU was recently awarded the designation of a Hispanic-serving institution by the U.S. Department of Education. In response, study abroad staff are currently reviewing their programs and approaches to determine how to ensure that the demographics of the study abroad population reflect the larger student body. OIA often works with other offices on campus that serve underrepresented students, first-generation students, and students with disabilities to promote study abroad opportunities. One of OIA’s most frequent collaborators is the First Generation Transition & Mentoring Programs office. 

“Specifically in collaboration with the first-generation office, we copresent with the financial aid office at the beginning of each academic year,” says Whitney Longnecker, director of study abroad. “The presentation [to students] discusses the basics of study abroad but also covers the specifics of how to apply financial aid and scholarships to a study abroad experience.”

The presentation helps make sure first-generation and other underrepresented students are aware of the funding opportunities available for education abroad. Funded by a $4 education abroad fee that every enrolled student pays each semester, OIA administers a scholarship program that offers more than $350,000 each year to support study abroad. 

OIA makes an effort to reach out to underrepresented students throughout the year. “We also hold remote advising hours in the first generation programs office, which is a good way to meet with first-generation students in a space in which they are already comfortable,” Longnecker says. OIA continues to offer students similar levels of outreach and support once they go abroad.

Cesar Rocha, a senior studying mechanical engineering, spent fall 2017 at TTU’s study abroad center in Seville, Spain. He was able to take engineering courses as well as an upper-level Spanish class. As a first-generation student, he says he had never considered studying abroad before enrolling at TTU. “I was just trying to get to college and finish,” he says. 

Rocha adds that the program in Seville not only allowed him to keep up with his engineering curriculum, it also offered him a lot of first-time experiences. Although he is fluent in Spanish, it was the first time he had ever taken a formal Spanish class. Traveling to Spain was also the first time he had flown on an airplane. “It totally pushed me out of my comfort zone,” Rocha says. 

Rocha is one of many TTU students who have spent time at TTU’s study abroad center in Spain. Since 2000, the center has served more than 4,600 TTU students from all academic disciplines in both summer and semester-long programs—representing more than 40 percent of all TTU students who study abroad. The center also provides an opportunity for many TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants to spend a semester abroad. 

Additionally, each semester, the TTU center in Seville hosts six to eight interns from the University of Seville who assist center staff with administrative tasks as well as interact with TTU students to improve their Spanish language skills. This relationship has served as an indirect recruitment pipeline to TTU’s graduate programs. 

Myriam Rubio, who earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Seville, began working at the center as a linguistic assistant. She learned about TTU’s master’s program in Spanish through her interactions with the TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants who came to Seville to teach. Rubio is thriving in her graduate program at TTU. “I’m loving every minute of my stay on the campus in Lubbock. My experience as a master’s student is not only improving my performance as a [Spanish] instructor, but it is also allowing me to grow both professionally and personally,” she says.

Offering a U.S. Education in Costa Rica

Building on its experience managing a physical presence overseas in Spain, TTU’s most recent international venture is the new campus in San José, Costa Rica. Promerica Group approached TTU in 2014 with the idea of offering a U.S. education in Costa Rica. According to Jack Bimrose, former director of EDULINK, a subsidiary of Promerica Group, U.S. higher education is cost prohibitive for large segments of the Central American population. The concept is to make academic programs related to strategic areas of development in the region more accessible to local students. 

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The first group of students began their studies at TTU-CR in August 2018 in five academic programs: electrical engineering, industrial engineering, computer science, mathematics, and restaurant and hotel management.

The campus, which has been accredited by SACS, will offer the same curriculum in English as the main campus in Lubbock. TTU faculty will teach on the Costa Rica campus, which has been built to the specifications of the departments at TTU. The hope is that TTU-CR will eventually host U.S. students who are studying abroad. 

“This is a unique model of engagement with industrial partners who want to provide the quality of a U.S. college education to Costa Rican students,” President Schovanec says. “We want the Costa Rica campus to become a nexus for postsecondary education in Central America.”