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.” 

Stony Brook University’s reach extends far beyond its campus on Long Island, New York. As part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system, Stony Brook has leveraged its position as a public research university to develop strategic partnerships around the world and attract a robust international student population. The university has established research field sites in Madagascar and Kenya and a global campus in Korea, in addition to considerable engagement in China. 

In the last few years, Stony Brook’s administration has invested significant resources in enhancing its comprehensive internationalization agenda. President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. and Provost Michael A. Bernstein have dedicated more than $1 million to support five new staff members in the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) and the development of a new China Center, which aims to boost recruitment and build alumni relations in China. 

Leading the charge for internationalization is Jun Liu, who joined Stony Brook as vice provost of global affairs, dean of international academic programs and services (IAPS), and professor of linguistics in January 2016. As the senior international officer (SIO), Liu oversees the OGA, which encompasses study abroad, visa and immigration services, global partnerships, intensive English programs, and the Institute for Global Studies. 

One of the first things Liu did as SIO was to visit the institution’s main study abroad and international research facilities, as well as spend time getting to know the campus community. “I spent a lot of time understanding what the current global operations were, ...what challenges we were facing, and what... concerns administrators, faculty, and students had in terms of globalizing the campus,” he says. 

Liu created an international advisory board to provide input on the development of a global strategic plan, which helped build a vision for internationalization and streamline Stony Brook’s existing international activities. Some of the recommendations that came out of the strategic planning process included increased campus outreach through a global forum on various international topics and a newsletter promoting international activities on campus. The OGA revamped the website for study abroad programs and created a database of Stony Brook’s international research, partnerships, and initiatives around the world to better track the university’s global engagement.  

“We now have a purposeful strategy to have planned campus internationalization through concrete projects, innovative programs, and engagement of faculty, staff, and students. Meanwhile, we are constantly assessing what we do and adjusting the process,” Liu says.

Fostering an Environment for International Student Success

In response to its growing international student population, Stony Brook has expanded the support services it offers to its international students, which currently make up 23 percent of the total student body, including students on optional practical training. With a 61 percent increase of international students over the past 6 years—from 3,726 in 2011–12 to 5,998 in 2017–18—the university has adopted strategies that focus not only on growing the number of international students, but also on attracting academically talented incoming students through innovative recruitment strategies, such as working directly with high schools and developing alternative admissions criteria, like adding oral interviews and accepting Chinese Gaokao scores. 

In addition to providing a comprehensive orientation staffed by international student ambassadors, Stony Brook offers workshops to help new international students succeed. Trista Yang Lu, coordinator for international student orientation and services, runs iCafe, a coffee house and international student success workshop series. International students are invited to come and discuss topics such as class participation, reading and study skills, networking, and time management. 

To encourage international students to attend, Lu has partnered with the professors who teach first-year seminars. All freshman students are required to attend a first-year seminar within their respective colleges, with the goal of helping them acclimate to the campus community. “As part of the curriculum, students participating in the first-year seminar are required to attend [a certain number of] themed events,” Lu says. “They can attend iCafe to satisfy these requirements.”

iCafe is just one example of the university’s broader focus on international student success. With support from Provost Michael A. Bernstein, and in collaboration with the Division of Undergraduate Education, the OGA launched an international student success task force made up of faculty and staff across all major academic and administrative units intended to identify common challenges to international student success. 

A new initiative aimed at promoting international student success is the Global Summer Institute, a short-term summer program launched in 2017 that allows students planning to enroll at Stony Brook an extended period of adjustment prior to the start of classes in the fall. In the first year, 235 students enrolled, and Stony Brook is hoping to attract similar numbers in summer 2018.

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The Global Summer Institute has three different tracks. Students can (1) participate in an intensive English program; (2) enroll in a three-week certificate program that focuses to getting to know the U.S. culture and educational system; or (3) take academic classes that are part of Stony Brook’s regular summer offerings. 

The Global Summer Institute also serves as a recruitment incentive for students at partner universities who want to experience college life in the United States. The program has helped to deepen relationships in regions of the world where Stony Brook is actively engaged. In 2017, the university partnered with the Malagasy Ministry of Education to sponsor a Malagasy student to attend the Global Summer Institute.

Facilitating Study Abroad Through Faculty-Led Programs

In addition to fostering its international student programs, Stony Brook’s global strategic plan aims to create new and unique educational opportunities abroad. As part of the SUNY system, Stony Brook has become a leader in education abroad among the 64 campuses in New York state. With more than 700 students studying abroad in the 2016–17 academic year, Stony Brook sends more students abroad than any of its SUNY peers. 

Along with the 18 study abroad programs led by Stony Brook faculty, Stony Brook students have access to more than 500 education abroad programs offered through the other SUNY campuses. For programs not directly taught by Stony Brook faculty, the university’s new course articulation database provides a list of preapproved courses at partner institutions. The database eases the process of transferring study abroad credits back to Stony Brook.  

Stony Brook’s first faculty-led study abroad program was launched in the early 1980s by Italian professor Mario Mignone, who has continued to take students to Italy for more than 30 years. In that time, in addition to using its field sites in Kenya and Madagascar to offer specialized education abroad experiences, Stony Brook’s faculty-led programs have expanded to include Russia and Tanzania. One of Stony Brook’s strategies to building a robust education abroad portfolio has been to leverage its international relationships and expand existing programs to other disciplines.

Linguistics professor John Bailyn, who is also the director of the SUNY Russia Programs Network, oversees two summer programs in Russia. “Explore St. Petersburg!” features an extensive cultural program that gives students the chance to become familiar with the city through excursions, films, lectures, and other events. Participants attend courses in cultural and media studies at an international summer school where they interact with students from throughout Russia and Europe, and they also complete an internship. Bailyn also directs the Advanced Critical Language Institute for Russian Immersion, which provides an intensive summer language program.

Research Abroad for Engineers at the Turkana Basin Institute

As the academic affiliate for the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), Stony Brook has been able to expand its study abroad portfolio due to its physical presence in Kenya. Located in a remote part of northwestern Kenya, the TBI is one of the world’s premier paleoanthropology research field stations. The Turkana Basin has been the site of unprecedented fossil and archaeological discoveries that trace back to the origins of human civilization.  

The TBI was the brainchild of Stony Brook professor Richard Leakey, a world-renowned paleoanthropologist who approached the university in 2005 with the idea of creating a permanent infrastructure for yearround research. Stony Brook committed funding to the project, and construction of the two field camps located at Lake Turkana was completed in 2016. 

In addition to serving as a base for researchers from around the world, the TBI hosts a variety of study abroad programs, including a summer and semesterlong Origins Field School where students can earn 15 credits of 300-level coursework in archaeology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and geology.

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Other academic departments have also been able to take advantage of Stony Brook’s presence in Kenya. When Fotis Sotiropoulos, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), joined Stony Brook, he knew he wanted to implement programs that would give engineering students a global perspective. 

Sotiropoulos visited the TBI in March 2017, and by May, he had sent nine students to Kenya as part of the new six-week Global Innovation Field School. Not only was the off-grid construction of the physical infrastructure at the TBI interesting from an engineering perspective, it also gave the CEAS students a chance to visit a truly unique place, Sotiropoulos says. 

During the 2017 and 2018 programs, students worked on projects such as designing a septic system for a rural clinic and cataloging and repairing instruments donated by nongovernmental organizations. Faculty encouraged students to identify more challenging problems that they could bring back to Stony Brook to work on for their senior design course. 

Julian Kingston, who studied engineering at Stony Brook as an undergraduate student, participated in the 2017 Global Innovation Field School as a teaching assistant. He says that the students had to rethink their problem-solving approaches during the experience. “When we first arrived at the TBI facility and connected with the nearby community, the students had a plethora of solutions to everyday ‘problems’ they saw the community having,” he says. “After taking the time to connect with and communicate with the community, the students were surprised to find that the problems they identified—such as moving large loads over long distances—was not an issue for the community. A huge challenge for the students coming in was to put...what they saw as problems to the side in order to listen for what the community actually needed.”

One of the biggest challenges that students discovered was a lack of access to clean water. Available water sources in the Turkana Basin often have high levels of fluoride, which is toxic in large amounts. Two students from the 2017 Global Innovation Field School, Cheng-Wen Hsu and Jacob Marlin, discovered another use for the excess goat bones that they found in this community of goat herders. Hsu and Marlin charred the goat bones using firewood and a tin can to create a charcoal water filter that decreased fluoride levels. 

Hsu and Marlin have since been working with a Stony Brook faculty member to refine the filter as part of their senior capstone project. “[It was] a first step to creating a sustainable filter using minimal materials that could make a difference for the local community long term,” Kingston says. 

Community Outreach in Madagascar Through Centre ValBio

One of Stony Brook’s strategic internationalization priorities is engagement in Madagascar through the Centre ValBio (CVB), a modern research campus located in the rainforest in the southeastern part of the country. Although the island of Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is rich in biodiversity, encompassing a wide range of ecosystems. 

Patricia Wright, a distinguished professor of anthropology and primatologist at Stony Brook, founded the CVB campus in 2003. Wright is known for, among other things, the discovery of a new species of lemurs in the late 1980s. She was also the driving force behind the creation of Ranomafana National Park, the 106,000acre World Heritage site where CVB is located. CVB currently employs 70 Malagasy in the facility’s day-today operations. 

Wright took the first group of Stony Brook students to Madagascar in 1993 as one of the university’s earliest faculty-led programs. She wanted to create a study abroad program for science majors that not only gave them an immersive opportunity to do field work, but also a chance to interact with the local community. Wright continues to take students to Centre ValBio every summer, winter, and fall semester. 

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Ezzeldin Enan, a senior who is double majoring in biology and anthropology, says the program helped him decide that he wants to focus on global health in his future career. “What specifically drew me to the study abroad program was the independent research opportunity in biological anthropology, overseen by... Patricia Wright, as well as full access to an advanced lab facility,” he says. 

CVB is also home to the Global Health Institute (GHI), which promotes health research in the region, in conjunction with a nongovernmental organization dedicated to establishing an evidence-based model health system for Madagascar. The GHI addresses health care issues ranging from trauma and injury prevention to oral health treatments. Since 2005, Stony Brook dental students and faculty have traveled to Madagascar to support efforts to improve the oral health of underserved communities. 

In 2016, CVB launched the world’s first medical delivery drones to transport blood, stool, and tissue samples from remote Malagasy communities to the Centre ValBio research station for quick diagnoses. The drone, designed by Stony Brook alumni Daniel Pepper, is also able to deliver medications to the same communities, which are often cut off from proper health care services due to poor or nonexistent roads. 

Stony Brook’s engagement in Madagascar has allowed the institution to build deeper collaboration with other international partners such as Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) in China. In 2017, for example, two students from SUSTC joined the winter study abroad program at CVB. 

“We encourage and advocate for multilateral partnerships....We share our resources with many international partner universities [by inviting] their students and faculty to participate in the signature programs we have around the world,” says Liu. 

Offering a Stony Brook Degree at SUNY Korea

In 2008, Myung Oh, an alumni who earned a PhD in electrical engineering and served as former deputy prime minister of South Korea, approached Stony Brook about the possibility of opening a global campus in Korea. Following approval by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST), SUNY Korea launched its first four graduate degree programs in 2012 on the Incheon Global Campus, a global education hub established in the high-tech city of Songdo, South Korea. The next year, students enrolled in SUNY Korea’s first undergraduate degree program in technological systems management. The first class graduated in January 2017.

SUNY Korea currently offers four undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 500 students; degree offerings and student numbers are steadily growing. Students are awarded a Stony Brook degree, and all programs require students to spend 1 year on the main campus in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), which is also part of the SUNY system, joined Stony Brook on the SUNY Korea campus in 2017 to offer its programs in fashion design and fashion business management. Huojeong Son, a mathematics major who is planning to graduate in December 2018, says she always wanted to study in the United States. She chose SUNY Korea because it was more affordable than spending 4 years in the United States, but still gave her an opportunity to study abroad. 

Stony Brook hopes to use its physical presence in Korea as a way to establish itself as a global hub in Asia. The institution has worked with the Chinese Ministry of Education and Chinese Embassy in Korea to accredit the campus and boost the enrollment of students from China.  

“Having a global campus enhances our brand and reputation overseas,” says Imin Kao, executive director of SUNY Korea and professor of mechanical engineering. 

Leveraging its physical footprint around the world— from SUNY Korea to the field sites in Africa—and developing more than 160 strategic international partnerships has allowed Stony Brook to raise its profile as a top research institution. Stony Brook’s overall approach to internationalization has been built on developing symbiotic relationships with international partners. “A lot of these programs are enabled by the fact that we are a trusted partner,” says President Stanley. “The more resources you invest in an area, the more people know you are going to deliver. You are not just there to take advantage, you really are making a long-term commitment.”

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At first glance, St. Lawrence University might give the impression that it is an institution far removed from the rest of the world. Founded in 1856 in Canton—a town of 10,000 in upstate New York— St. Lawrence is a private liberal arts institution with a student body of 2,500. Ottawa, Ontario, is the closest major city, located 80 miles away across the Canadian border. But it is the university’s remote location that fuels a need to give its students an international perspective.

“St. Lawrence is indeed very isolated. Because of that, there has been very strong faculty leadership to implement more global engagement,” says Marina Llorente, a professor of modern languages and literature who became associate dean of international and intercultural studies and senior international officer in 2016.  

St. Lawrence’s commitment to global engagement dates back to the 1920s, when students established the first International Relations Club on campus. Beginning in the 1930s, the institution hosted a series of cross-border conferences on U.S.-Canadian relations in collaboration with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1949, St. Lawrence hosted the world’s first Model United Nations. The institution was also one of the first U.S. universities to actively engage in East Africa in the early 1970s. 

“The drive to explore and understand the world beyond our rural upstate New York campus has been part of St. Lawrence University’s institutional DNA for over 90 years,” said President William L. Fox. “St. Lawrence has continuously focused on building international components into curricular and cocurricular programming. You can say that internationalization is central to what we do and who we are.”

Nine percent of St. Lawrence’s total student population comes from abroad, but the institution also serves highly qualified, often high-need students from the surrounding region in upstate New York. More than 20 percent of the domestic undergraduates are eligible for Pell grants. 

“For those students, the sort of international perspective we have is amplified even more,” says Karl Schonberg, vice president of the university and dean of academic affairs. “There is a really interesting relationship between the local and the global here because of that mix of students in our population.” 

Prior to Llorente, Schonberg served as the associate dean of international and intercultural studies, leading the Patti McGill Peterson Center for International and Intercultural Studies (CIIS). CIIS oversees all international programming on campus, manages off-campus study programs, and coordinates a number of area studies programs. The associate dean position is filled by a tenured senior faculty member who serves for 4 years, with a possible two-year extension. 

Opportunities for Internationalization Through Off-Campus Programs

Since 1987, CIIS has coordinated the international and domestic off-campus programs, which previously operated through individual departments. CIIS currently manages 30 off-campus study programs in more than 25 countries. These programs provide significant professional development opportunities for faculty members. Forty-six percent of full-time faculty have led off-campus study programs of various lengths.

English professor Natalia Singer says that she never would have imagined that joining the faculty at St. Lawrence would take her as far afield as France and India. “There are so many projects and endeavors that have helped internationalize our curriculum that I’ve been able to take part in. I’ve been able to not only broaden my own curricular specialities, but also to direct and teach abroad,” she says. 

Students similarly benefit from a myriad of options available for experiential learning. Almost 70 percent of students participate in an off-campus study experience prior to graduating. The Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Open Doors report ranked St. Lawrence 15th among the top 40 baccalaureate institutions for the number of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs in 2015–16.  

St. Lawrence offers five signature semester- or yearlong study abroad programs in France, Kenya, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and its First-Year program in London, England. In addition, it runs signature domestic off-campus programs in the Adirondack Mountains and New York City. The university has seen significant growth in its off-campus summer programs over the last several years. In summer 2018, for example, St. Lawrence offered 12 courses in Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Nicaragua, Rwanda, and the United Kingdom, and two in the United States.

Madeleine Wong, associate professor and chair of global studies, recently spent a semester teaching in St. Lawrence’s First-Year program in London. As an alternative to the institution’s on-campus First-Year program in Canton, students live together in central London and take liberal arts courses that focus on developing their writing, speaking, and research skills. “I wanted to make sure that our program did not reinforce or perpetuate some of the tourist expectations that students have about study abroad,” Wong says. 

A particular area of focus has been the creation of education abroad programs for students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). A growing number of students in these disciplines have been able to engage in off-campus programs due to concerted faculty efforts; in 2016–17, approximately 29 percent of students in off-campus programs were STEM majors.

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Ten years ago, Ed Harcourt, professor of computer science and mathematics, worked with CIIS to develop the first education abroad program for engineers. The result was a semester-long program hosted by the University of Otago in New Zealand. “Over the years, I’ve been hunting around for places for our science, math, and engineering students to study abroad. The biggest constraint is being able to take these classes, science and math classes, in English,” Harcourt says. 

St. Lawrence STEM majors also have study abroad options at James Cook University in Australia, the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago, and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China. 

Funding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Abroad

In addition to its credit-bearing off-campus programs, CIIS offers a variety of opportunities for students to conduct research or pursue personal projects abroad. CIIS receives support from various donors, many of whom are alumni of off-campus programs, to fund travel enrichment grants that allow students to pursue an academic or personal interest while studying abroad. Travel research grants are also available to students who want to pursue more extensive study or research through independent travel or during an extension of an off-campus study program. 

Music major Emma Greenough received a CIIS travel research grant to attend the Russell Memorial Weekend festival in Doolin, a small coastal village in Ireland, during her semester abroad in Cork City. “My goal of this brief, yet informative and meaningful trip was to show how Irish music and its culture, including its natural beauty, are intermingled throughout the country,” she says. “My study abroad experiences, especially my time in Doolin, nurtured my love of Irish music and provided me reason to return [to Ireland] in the future.”

The CIIS Fellows program is another funding opportunity that supports faculty-student collaboration throughout the world and has funded 33 projects since 2001. The Fellows program is noncredit bearing but may lay the foundation for future academic work such as a senior capstone project. 

Wong took four students abroad to conduct independent research through the CIIS Fellows program. In July 2018, she accompanied global studies major Shanice Arlow to Namibia to examine how notions of race impact different populations in post-apartheid Namibia. Wong and Arlow received $7,500 from CIIS to conduct interviews with people across multiple generations and do archival research at the National Library of Namibia. 

Wong says the students’ projects are often tangential to her own research interests: “My role is to foster a sense of intellectual curiosity and experiential learning of the world in my students. Each of the students have their own interests, and my job is to help them develop critical thinking skills and [learn] how to do research in a foreign place to enhance their understandings of diverse global issues. I’m there to supervise them and teach them to ask interesting questions.” 

Encouraging Self-Awareness Through Global Studies

St. Lawrence’s off-campus study programs provide a way for students enrolled in interdisciplinary area studies programs to gain international experiences and still complete their degree requirements. The university offers degree programs in African, Asian, Canadian, Caribbean/Latin American, and European studies, as well as programs in Native American and African American studies. Drawing on the strengths of its area studies programs, the institution received a $1 million external grant from the Endeavor Foundation to support five faculty positions and establish the Global Studies Department in 2000.

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Professor of global studies Eve Stoddard was the first chair of the new department. She says that the global studies major was born from the fact that many themes in international studies cut across countries and disciplines. In addition to learning a second language, global studies majors take five core courses that introduce them to key concepts and debates related to global processes, political economies, and cultural studies. Students also design a concentration, which might be an intense area study or a cross-cutting theme such as gender studies.

The global studies curriculum is designed to encourage students to examine their own identities and place in the world through a global studies lens. “A lot of our students have developed that critical self-awareness of who they are, …their roles in society, [and] their responsibilities to the world, to their local communities, and to the world,” Wong says. 

Britni Stupin knew she wanted to major in global studies when she was accepted to St. Lawrence. As she started to take her global studies courses, she began to gravitate toward topics related to Africa and public health. 

Stupin was able to further pursue these interests through the Semester in Kenya program, which is run through St. Lawrence’s campus in Nairobi. While she was there, she focused on a community approach to health care. Stupin had the opportunity to work as a health programs intern at a nongovernmental organization in Kigali, Rwanda. “In essence, global studies has allowed me to find and pursue my academic interests and passions and has given me the tools necessary to think critically about the world around me,” she says.  

Establishing a Long-standing Footprint in Kenya

Stupin is one of more than 2,000 students who have studied in Kenya since St. Lawrence launched its first semester-long program there in 1974. In 2014, the institution celebrated 40 years of engagement in East Africa, based out of its five-acre Nairobi campus, which currently employs 17 Kenyans. “The program is very much about not encountering East Africa, but engaging and embedding yourself in the local community,” says Matthew Carotenuto, a professor of history who also coordinates the African Studies program, which launched in the 1980s. 

During the first week of the Semester in Kenya program, students live in accommodations on the Nairobi campus and participate in a weeklong orientation that prepares them to live independently in Kenya, with an emphasis on safety and security. Students spend 8 weeks on the campus where they take a series of courses, including Swahili and “Culture, Environment and Development in East Africa.” The group participates in rural and urban homestays as well as three extended field experiences in northern Tanzania and in various locations in Kenya. After the first 3 months in Kenya, students do a monthlong independent study, often with a placement at a host organization that works with an issue that interests them. 

In addition to Kenya, students are placed all over East Africa, including Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. For instance, students have interned with a member of the Kenyan parliament who is a St. Lawrence alumnus, and other students who are interested in public health have been placed at a hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  

St. Lawrence strives for a mutually beneficial relationship in its overall approach to engagement in Kenya. Since 1984, the university has offered annual scholarship opportunities to Kenyan students to study in Canton, New York. Many Kenyan alumni who have studied at St. Lawrence have gone on to distinguished careers across Kenya, including four who were elected to the Kenyan parliament.

Emmanuel Ngenoh, a computer science and economics major who graduated in 2015, says his scholarship to St. Lawrence changed his life. While he initially struggled to adjust to life in Canton, he received support from the close-knit campus community and his host family. “I went from wanting to go back home the first few months at St. Lawrence, to not wanting to leave at all my senior year,” Ngenoh says.

He has subsequently returned to East Africa, where he has worked as a software developer and cloud solutions specialist. Ngenoh is currently planning on enrolling in a master’s program in information systems management at Carnegie Mellon University, which includes 1 year of study in Australia and 1 year of study in Pennsylvania. “There is no question as to how my experience at St. Lawrence University has influenced my adaptability in the world and expanded my abilities,” Ngenoh says. 

In 1992, the university created a standing two-year position for a visiting Swahili scholar who can either conduct research toward a PhD from a Kenyan university or earn a master’s degree from St. Lawrence. The current visiting scholar, Khalid Omar Kitito, previously worked as an education officer at the National Museums of Kenya and interacted with St. Lawrence students who visited the museums in Mombasa as part of the Semester in Kenya program.  

As the visiting scholar, Kitito taught Swahili and two semesters of “Swahili Culture and Identity,” which were intended to help students understand cultures other than their own. Moreover, Kitito taught a course titled “Hakuna Matata” for Canton area high school students to share Kenyan cultures and cultural practices. While at St. Lawrence, Kitito earned a master’s degree in human development and school counseling. He says his stipend has also helped fund his PhD program in Kenya.

Creating an International Community on Campus

In addition to welcoming international scholars on campus, St. Lawrence has made international student recruitment a strategic priority. The university has doubled its overall international undergraduate student population from 4 percent in 1995 to 8.5 percent in 2016. The campus hosted a total of 217 international undergraduate students from more than 60 different countries in 2016.

A large number of St. Lawrence University’s international students come from United World Colleges (UWC), a network of 17 high schools around the world, with support from the Shelby Davis Foundation, which offers up to $20,000 in financial aid per student. “They’re among the very best students on this campus and they’re involved in everything you can mention,” says President Fox. 

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With the growing international student population, St. Lawrence has increased the number of staff supporting the students’ academic and social adjustment. In addition to organizing intercultural activities, CIIS staff have focused on integrating domestic and international students. One way they have done this is through the creation of a living learning community called InterCultural House (I-House). I-House was established in 1984 as a coed facility accommodating around 80 domestic and international students. The internationally themed community offers diverse events, trips and community building activities, and a weekly tea time that encourages domestic and international students to come together and interact. 

Another major initiative is the Global Gateways program, which is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The program seeks to foster intercultural exchanges while strengthening the bond between domestic and international students. In summer 2017, the program brought together 19 international students and six domestic students for a twoweek program prior to the start of the fall semester. 

“Global Gateways seemed like the perfect opportunity to learn about the different people that live around the world who go to St. Lawrence,” says undergraduate Connor Glitz. “In 17 short days, the program transformed us from an international group who didn’t know each other into a family of St. Lawrence students.”

Svetlana Kononenko, an international student from Russia, wanted to join the program after struggling to connect with international peers in high school. “Paintballing, swimming, campus kitchens, biking, presentations, classes, and games late at night made Global Gateways into a memorable and valuable experience,” she says. 

The program represents a microcosm of St. Lawrence’s overall strategy for bridging the local and global. “I strongly believed that this...program would help me to develop leadership skills and find my niche in a truly global university community by providing a forum for both international students and domestic students to blur the line of difference, thereby building an inclusive community,” Kononenko says. “And that’s what I found.”

The mission of Babson College is to educate entrepreneurial leaders who create great economic and social value—everywhere. Recognized as one of the top entrepreneurship schools in the United States, Babson draws more than 1,000 international students from around the world to its campus in Wellesley, Massachusetts, every year. Nearly 27 percent of the undergraduate students and more than 70 percent of the graduate students come from abroad, with a total student body of just over 3,000.

Internationalization has been at the heart of Babson’s mission as a private business college since entrepreneur Roger Babson founded the institution in 1919. “Roger Babson took away the lesson from World War I that the world needed to come together,” says President Kerry Healey. “The way that he thought that could best be done was through business, executed in the interest of humanity. Roger Babson’s original vision is still applicable for us almost 100 years later.”  

Spreading Entrepreneurship Education Around the World

Babson seeks to share its approach to entrepreneurship education beyond the borders of its Wellesley campus. “We want to be the preeminent institution for entrepreneurship education everywhere,” says Amir Reza, vice provost for international and multicultural education and senior international officer (SIO). “The opportunities for internationalization sit within the ‘everywhere’ context. We want to create access to our methodology, which we call entrepreneurial thought and action.” 

Heidi Neck, professor of entrepreneurship, oversees the Global Symposia for Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE) program, which is delivered twice a year on the Babson campus and available on demand internationally. “We train other educators from around the world in how Babson teaches entrepreneurship,” Neck says.

Neck also directs the Babson Collaborative for Entrepreneurship Education, an institutional membership organization under Babson’s leadership made up of 23 institutions around the world. “We’re trying to build a better entrepreneurship education ecosystem by collaborating, helping one another, sharing best practices, but also imagining future possibilities,” Neck says. “Babson is very small, but we want to bring what we do with respect to entrepreneurship education to the world.”

Babson has used technology to increase access to its entrepreneurship expertise. The college has contributed six entrepreneurship courses to edX, the platform created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that provides online learning and massive online open courses (MOOCs). More than 100,000 people in 220 countries and territories have participated in Babson’s entrepreneurship MOOCs, according to Healey. 

Bringing Together International and Multicultural Education

The Glavin Office of Multicultural & International Education is at the heart of Babson’s internationalization efforts. It is home to international education, multicultural, service-learning, and multifaith programs. In an innovative approach to internationalization, the Glavin Office aims to foster conversations about identity, diversity, inclusion, and equity on campus. 

When Reza became SIO in 2010, he brought together international education—which includes education abroad and international student and scholar services—and multicultural education under the larger umbrella of the Glavin Office. In 2014, the office also assumed responsibility for service-learning and multifaith programs, which provided more intersectionality. 

“We have experimented with intentional strategies to bridge the gap between these areas to benefit our students’ education,” Reza says. “Each area continues to have professionals with expertise in their respective fields, and we have seen both organic and intentional programming that has helped us further the mission and goals of each area through the lens of the other.” 

Much of the Glavin Office’s programming consequently revolves around encouraging students to explore their cultural identities and how that impacts the ways in which they interact with the world. Glavin’s predeparture orientations for education abroad, for example, take an inclusive approach to the subject of identity. Students are asked to list five to 10 aspects of their identities and are guided through a set of reflection questions that ask them to explore the ways that identities like LGBTQ, gender, and race are seen in their host country and to consider how they will interact on those issues.

“What we are doing is talking about the relationship between identity and place for everybody, using several different examples,” explains Reza. “If I’m an African American student and I’m going to a predominantly white environment, what does that mean? Or if I am a Muslim and I want to practice my faith, what does Islamophobia mean for me?”

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Another example of the collaboration between the international and multicultural education teams was the development of a three-part workshop titled “Understanding Race and Racism in the U.S. for International Students.” Designed by arts and humanities professor Elizabeth Swanson, the first workshop gives students an understanding of language and terminology and the idea of race as a social construct. The second segment focuses on slavery and historical race relations in the United States, and the final workshop helps students process current events and issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the actions and policies of the Trump administration. 

The goal of the workshop series is to help international students gain a better perspective on current events and historical precedents that shape many of the discussions on today’s college campuses.

Salome Mosehle, a senior from South Africa, says that although her country has its own history of racism, she grew up in a predominantly black society. “I came to the United States and was told that there was a struggle that comes with being black,” she says. “It was a tough thing to grasp.”

She says the racism workshop helped her understand the new cultural context in which she found herself. “The [workshop] really helped open my eyes about what it means to be black in America,” Mosehle says. 

Recruiting International Students Through the Global Scholars Program

When Kerry Healey took office as Babson’s president in July 2013, one of the first things she did was to establish the Global Scholars program, a need-based scholarship for talented international students. She created the program because she wanted to diversify the international student population, both economically and geographically. “I thought that we were missing a great opportunity to bring some of the most talented students from around the world who aspire to be entrepreneurs to Babson,” Healey says. 

In 2014, when she offered the first 10 need-based scholarships for international students, more than 900 students applied. Since then, the college has committed more than $1 million a year to fund 10 scholarships, which cover tuition, room and board, airfare, and books, depending on the individual student’s level of need. There are currently 45 Global Scholars on the Babson campus.

A faculty mentor works with each cohort of Global Scholars, and the international student advising team designs a special orientation and plans retreats and cultural events throughout the year. 

“Having this group of scholars on campus has been transformative. We have the sense that each and every one of them are going to go back to their countries and become profound change makers,” Healey says. 

Lizaveta (Lisa) Litvinava, who earned a dual concentration in global business management and diversity and identity, is an international student from Belarus. Litvinava is among the first cohort of Global Scholars who graduated in May 2018. Her fellow Global Scholars came from Afghanistan, Brazil, Rwanda, and South Africa. 

Litvinava says that her experience as a Global Scholar has “meant everything.” “If it weren’t for [this program], I would have never been able to speak about the world in the way that I speak about it right now. I would never have been able to become the person I am right now without the experience and education that Babson gave me,” she says.

Creating a Welcoming Environment for International Students

With a third of its student body coming from abroad, Babson goes out of its way to make sure that international students such as Litvinava feel at home. Babson intentionally avoids separating international students from domestic students throughout their college experience. Many universities offer separate welcome programs for international students, but Babson holds a single orientation for all incoming students. While international students might attend specific sessions on topics such as immigration and work authorization, they are integrated with domestic students for the majority of the orientation. 

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The college has also taken specific steps to make sure that international students feel welcome in light of recent political developments. “We take our lead from students. When something happens in the world, such as the [travel] ban and attacks against DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], we reach out to students to find out what they need and what’s meaningful to them,” says Jamie Kendrioski, director of international services and multicultural education. “I don’t make any decision about how to react to a crisis or issue without talking to students first and seeing what matters to them,” adds Kendrioski. 

International students concur that Babson goes the extra mile to make sure that they feel comfortable. “From emails coming out from the president directly [to students] to teachers speaking about things in class, I think it gave us a sense of comfort and assurance that we are accepted here,” says Ashutosh Pandit, an MBA student from India.

Fostering Global Awareness Through Glavin Global Fellows

In order to bring together all of the various international opportunities available on campus, Babson launched the Glavin Global Fellows program, a cohort-based program for undergraduate students. The program includes a first-year living learning community, a certificate program, and internationally themed events throughout the year. The Glavin Office also sponsors students to take part in international and language case competitions, and it awards more than $12,000 in grants for students to conduct independent research abroad. 

According to Lorien Romito, director of education abroad and the Global Fellows program adviser, each year, approximately 250 students are Glavin Global Fellows and around 25 students graduate with the certificate. Romito also serves as the campus Fulbright adviser because students who demonstrate an early interest in international issues are prime candidates to apply for the Fulbright program.

To earn a Glavin Global Fellows certificate, students need to take two or more courses in a foreign language and three advanced classes with international content. Additionally, students need to participate in an international experience abroad or a multicultural experience in the United States. 

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Aidan Dennis, who is doing a dual concentration in global business management and social and cultural studies, first became interested in the Glavin Global Fellows program as a first-year student. He says that half of the 20 students living on his floor in the residence hall that first year were international. He describes the Glavin Global Fellows program as “a community of students who are very interested in global issues.” 

Dennis, who will graduate in 2019, has had three international experiences on three different continents. He studied abroad in Argentina and Chile, and he did a short-term elective abroad in Thailand and Laos. He also applied for and received a grant to spend a week in Amsterdam conducting interviews as part of a Glavin Global Fellows project on consumer behavior in the Netherlands. 

He says that spending time abroad helped him understand the challenges that international students at Babson face: “From the Glavin Global Fellows program, I really learned about myself through interacting with all these other people from different countries, and then going abroad myself and coming back is like stepping into their shoes.” 

Education Abroad for Global Entrepreneurs

Dennis is among the 547 Babson students who went abroad in 2016–17. In 2018, 52 percent of Babson’s graduating undergraduate class participated in a credit-bearing education abroad experience. This is an average increase of 10 percent year-over-year since 2005. 

Babson is intentional about its education abroad advising, with a particular focus on early outreach during students’ required first-year seminars. In addition to providing specialized workshops on finances for study abroad, the college awarded more than $368,000 in internal need-based education abroad grants to undergraduate students during the 2016–17 academic year. 

Babson offers a variety of programs of different lengths, ranging from short-term electives abroad to semester and academic year programs. Each year, approximately 150 undergraduate and 155 graduate students participate in faculty-led electives abroad that run during academic breaks. These courses combine classroom instruction on campus in Massachusetts with in-country lectures, company visits, and cultural excursions. Examples include a humanities course on postmodernism in the United Arab Emirates, a theater course in England, and an economics course in Argentina and Uruguay. 

Through Babson’s International Consulting Experience program, student teams work on project assignments with international corporate sponsors. The program includes predeparture sessions in the fall that are focused on consulting methodologies and intercultural competencies, with travel to the company site taking place during winter break. The 33 projects that were carried out over the past 5 years included 126 Babson students, 15 Babson faculty, and engaged partner schools and businesses in 12 countries. Participating companies during this period include Bosch in Germany, the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia, and Care&Share in India.

The college’s flagship education abroad program is a multidestination faculty-led program known as Babson - Russia, India, China: The Cornerstone of the New Global Economy (BRIC). Every fall semester, a cohort of 24 students spend a month each in St. Petersburg, Russia; Shanghai, China; and New Delhi, India. Babson faculty lead each segment of the program, offering a full courseload combined with business visits, cultural excursions, and service-learning opportunities. 

Bill Coyle, professor of accounting and law, has been taking students to Russia since the early 1990s. His relationships with partners there, along with commitment from other faculty and the Glavin Office, laid the foundation for the BRIC program, which launched in 2009. The program was created with a desire to give students a comparative framework within which to understand developing economies. 

Before departing for Russia, students attend an intensive predeparture orientation on the Babson campus that provides guidance on thinking comparatively across cultures. Students also take a two-credit intercultural communications course that spans the entire semester that allows them to reflect on their experiences in different cultural contexts. According to history professor Katherine Platt, the orientation and the communications course help students reflect on their identities as individuals and as a group. 

Notably, participation in BRIC has resulted in significant intercultural development demonstrated by pre- and post-Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) results. On average, participants’ IDI scores increase more than 20 percent. 

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Students benefit from simultaneously taking business and liberal arts classes. “The whole semester is a balance of business and liberal arts courses—entrepreneurship, management, history, and philosophy,” says Platt, who teaches in the India portion of the program. 

Coyle says the liberal arts courses provide a foundation for students to understand the three countries’ business environments. “As a business professor, I have a real appreciation for the fact that you can’t be serious about doing international business if you do not understand the liberal arts aspects of the country you are considering doing business in,” he says. “The way [Russians] do business is based on their history and politics and economics and the literature they have grown up with.”

Alumni Outreach Around the World

With 40,000 alumni in 125 countries, Babson has recently focused on finding innovative ways to build up its alumni network. In 2015, President Healey launched Babson Connect: Worldwide, a three-day alumni conference and networking platform that is held in a different region each year. The inaugural conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, followed by Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Bangkok, Thailand; and Madrid, Spain. Approximately 400 alumni attended each conference. 

Babson has been able to get significant press coverage prior to the events, which in turn has boosted the number of student applications from that region. “We saw immediately that bringing the conference to the region [gave us a return in investment] in alumni support [that was] many times [more valuable than] the cost of the event,” Healey says. “There are benefits to enrollment, fundraising, and just general reputational benefits. We have the opportunity to rally all of our local alumni in the planning stage to make sure that we have local engagement.” 

The 2019 Babson Connect: Worldwide will return to Boston, Massachusetts, to celebrate Babson’s 100th birthday, giving its international alumni a chance to reconnect at their alma mater. “I’m proud to say we are coming home for our centennial,” Healey says. 

During a study abroad program in Italy, Lauren Schwartz took away more than just a deeper appreciation for pasta. She gained a new perspective on the relationship between culture and solution development—an outlook that will no doubt serve her well in her studies and future career. This revelation took place the summer after her freshman year, when Schwartz and 30 other engineering majors visited France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland as part of the Rising Sophomore Abroad Program (RSAP) at Virginia Tech.

“While we were there, we visited the Barilla pasta factory,” Schwartz says. “As a foodie, that was really exciting. And as an industrial engineer, seeing what the production line was like, what kind of safety measures were in place, and what kind of quality control they had was also really interesting.”

At the factory, Schwartz noticed that the packaging of products differs widely between Europe and the United States. Pasta boxes in the United States include a window to show the product to consumers who might not understand the differences in pasta varieties. “In Europe, they wouldn’t even think to put a window on the boxes,” Schwartz says. “But having to design a product that’s different for a global consumer was really eye-opening and kind of captured the essence of what RSAP is about.”

Opening the Window to the World

Virginia Tech’s RSAP currently takes approximately 180 engineering students abroad each year for 2 weeks through several different destinations immediately after the end of their first year of college. The idea, says associate professor David Knight, is to whet students’ appetites for study abroad through a short-term experience early on, with the hope that they will seek out longer programs later in their academic careers. Early assessments seem to indicate a positive correlation; nearly all of the participants in one of the cohorts had at least one additional international experience.

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The program started in 2008 as a Dean’s Signature Program, with 15 students traveling together to Europe. In 2012, the program was moved to the Department of Engineering Education, which serves first-year and transfer students. The department has been able to scale the program from 24 students in 2014 to 180 students in 2018. In 2019, students had the option of taking one of six different tracks: (1) Chile and Argentina; (2) China; (3) Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria; (4) New Zealand and Australia; (5) Spain and Morocco; or (6) the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“The program was created [to offer] a short-term experience for students that would fit in their schedule and curriculum in their first year,” says Nicole Sanderlin, director of global engagement for the College of Engineering. “It was really designed to introduce students very early on to the idea of being a globally engaged engineer and looking at engineering as a global discipline. It’s become a cornerstone of our engineering study abroad opportunities.”

Adopting a Wider Outlook on Global Issues

RSAP is open to all first-year and transfer students in the College of Engineering. In the spring semester, Knight teaches a three-credit course titled “Global STEM Practice: Leadership and Culture,” which involves a two-hour weekly lecture on the types of global problems that engineers face and the various contextual factors that influence their approaches and solutions. “All of the students are in the same three-credit course together at Virginia Tech before they go abroad,” Knight says. “It’s a chance, before you actually go do the international experience, to think across all of the tracks.”

Students then take a track-specific recitation section that is led by a graduate teaching assistant wherein they learn about the language and culture of the countries where they will be traveling. The two-week travel components comprise a series of visits to engineering companies, universities, and cultural sites. Students engage in a sequence of reflective assignments while they are in-country and once they return to the United States so that they can make meaning of their experiences and draw connections to their coursework and development as future engineers.

Bridging the Classroom and Real-World Settings

Doctoral student Kirsten Davis works with Knight to recruit students and arrange the program logistics. She has also served as a teaching assistant in Australia, Spain and Morocco, and the United Kingdom and Ireland. She became interested in RSAP based on her own experience working as an engineer after college. “I traveled to a lot of other countries as a part of my job and I realized that a lot of other engineers weren’t prepared for that aspect of engineering work,” Davis says.

Her observation of a disconnect between engineering education and the realities of the workplace became both the subject of her dissertation and a key part of her work with RSAP.

Davis notes that traveling at the end of the semester helps students to apply what they learned in the classroom. “We talk all semester about how engineering can be different in different places, but then they get there and they finally start to get the picture of why it’s important and why this is relevant to them,” Davis says.

Merging Formal and Informal Learning

Professor Matt James was one of the faculty leaders for a track to Ecuador, Peru, and Chile in 2018. The group visited a wastewater treatment facility in Quito, Ecuador, and a humanitarian nonprofit that is developing a fog net to capture water in Lima, Peru. The students had the chance to examine environmental engineering issues affecting two different communities and their respective solutions.

Throughout the experience, James appreciated the opportunity to get to know the students on a different level. “You really find out what motivates them, what they’re worried about, what excites them, that sort of thing,” he says.

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An important aspect of RSAP is the informal learning that occurs throughout the students’ time abroad. Professor Homero Murzi was one of James’s coleaders on the trip to South America last year. Murzi says that they are intentional about giving students the freedom to make their own decisions when they have downtime. “This is about them becoming experienced travelers, it’s about them finding ways to interact with a new culture,” he says.

Some of that intercultural insight is gleaned before the students even depart campus. Marlena Lester, director of advising, has led students to China and to the United Kingdom and Ireland. To help prepare her first-year students to go abroad, she invited international students to participate in panel discussions on their home countries and cultures. “That seemed to be very beneficial, especially when our students traveled to China last year. They had a lot of questions around technology and access and food,” she says. “It was really good for both the students and the panelists, who talked about the things that we should expect and also the differences and similarities that we might face when we go there.”

Expanding the Education Abroad Student Pool

RSAP has worked to expand access to education abroad programs to underrepresented student groups. The student cohorts participating in RSAP are generally more diverse than the general student population enrolled in the College of Engineering with respect to gender and race. According to Davis, program leaders team up with student organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers to do outreach.

From 2012 to 2014, RSAP also collaborated with faculty at North Carolina A&T State University (N.C. A&T), a historically black university located in in Greensboro, North Carolina. Students from N.C. A&T participated in Virginia Tech’s predeparture class virtually and visited the campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, for 1 week. The two groups of students then traveled abroad together.

The partnership between the institutions ended when the initiating faculty member left Virginia Tech. However, it gave N.C. A&T the experience and push to develop a similar program of its own. “Beyond being a wonderful opportunity to bring students from different institutional environments and backgrounds together in the program, the collaboration was a way for A&T to build its own institutional capacity to support this kind of program,” Knight says.

In 2018, Knight worked with his colleagues in the College of Engineering to secure a grant from the National Science Foundation that provided funding for 26 community college students anticipating transferring to an engineering bachelor’s program at Virginia Tech to participate in RSAP. The community college students, working with their own faculty at Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and Virginia Western Community College, interacted with Virginia Tech professors online and then traveled with the Virginia Tech students abroad.

Christian Sorenson, who transfers to Virginia Tech from NOVA in fall 2019, traveled to Europe with RSAP last year. If Sorenson hadn’t been able to participate in RSAP, he wouldn’t have otherwise been able to fit a study abroad program into his aeronautical engineering curriculum. “The big takeaway is seeing how other countries go about solving their problems,” he says. 

The experience also emphasized the need to engage with and learn from other people. “Every day was an exercise in meeting new people and seeing how your perspectives could benefit each other,” Sorenson says.

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Virginia Tech

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Chace Avery’s dedication to Habitat for Humanity began with a study abroad trip to England. While spending a semester at the University of Evansville (UE)’s satellite campus in Harlaxton, England, Avery applied for an international build project in Portugal through Habitat for Humanity International’s Global Village program. Accompanied by Holly Carter, UE’s director of education abroad, Avery and 13 other UE students spent 4 days in Braga, Portugal, working on a house renovation, digging ditches, tying rebar, and laying down a gravel floor. When they weren’t working, Avery and his fellow students spent time with community members to learn about the local culture. “It’s definitely an immersive cultural experience, but you also get to put some hard work in,” he says. 

Serving Community Needs at Home and Internationally

The build project in Portugal was part of the Global Village program, which celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2019. Global Village offers short-term service trips abroad through Habitat for Humanity that allow volunteers to work side-by-side with local families to build safe, affordable housing. All projects are designed to meet the community needs determined by the local Habitat affiliates. The trips also focus on cultural immersion, with visits to local cultural sites, and foster a sense of global learning and understanding.

Once Avery returned to UE’s main campus in Evansville, Indiana, he wanted to find a way to continue working with Habitat locally. “Had I not had that experience in Portugal, I wouldn’t have had as much empathy with the global community in regard to poverty,” he says. “UE is a pretty philanthropically based institution, so we decided to talk to Habitat in Evansville and just figure out what would help them.”

The outcome of that meeting was a “barn blitz,” where members of the university community came together to build 25 yard barns, which function as outdoor storage sheds, for the local Evansville families served by Habitat. With financial support from the university, UE students, staff, and alumni also built the city’s 499th Habitat house, which was commemorated with a dedication ceremony led by UE President Christopher M. Pietruszkiewicz.

As former president of UE’s campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Avery assisted in organizing a second barn blitz and participated in another international build trip to Mexico through Global Village. He graduated in May 2019 with a degree in biochemistry and starts medical school at Indiana University in the fall— but he will take what he learned from Habitat with him. “I hope that at least a portion of my time post-medical school will be spent in international medicine,” Avery says.

Facilitating Altruistic Education

The University of Evansville’s close collaboration with both the local Habitat for Humanity and the Global Village initiative was spurred by the efforts of Carter, who was UE’s 2018 Changemaker Staff Member of the Year. Carter worked on her first international build in El Salvador in 2009. Since then, she has led more than 30 international builds for Habitat, many of which have included UE students.

Carter helped launch the UE Builds: Local and Global program, which works with both local and international build projects through the Evansville Habitat chapter and through Global Village. Habitat’s Global Village serves as a third-party provider for the international build trips, arranging the in-country logistics.

“I thought the project was perfect for university students, and particularly for UE students. Our students are…globally curious and have a passion for exploration,” Carter says. “So many [UE students] come from backgrounds that have taught them the value of work, so combining this with travel and helping others, they were lined up at my office door to get involved.”
Since launching in spring 2016 with 14 students traveling to Portugal, the UE Builds program has grown to 59 students going on short-term trips to Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Portugal, and Romania. Correspondingly, the program’s leadership has expanded from two administrators in spring 2016 to six faculty and administrator leaders today.

Prior to traveling abroad, students enroll in a onecredit course on campus that includes their predeparture orientation. “The course helps the students understand the experience from several different perspectives—both the social sciences and the engineering of the project. We discuss housing, poverty, travel, the actual build project, some of the skills we will use, and expectations,” Carter says.

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Encouraging Skill Set Development

UE’s collaborations with Global Village produce longterm benefits for both the receiving communities and the faculty and students who participate. UE students gain intercultural and practical skill sets that they can apply to their future careers and philanthropic efforts.

Theater professor Chuck Meacham, who specializes in technical production and stage management, initially got involved with local projects in Evansville because, as he puts it, “I know which end of a hammer to use with a nail.” Since Carter was the only person on campus who was certified to lead Global Village trips, Meacham decided to apply for funding to cover the costs of training to become UE’s second trip leader.

Meacham received support from the UE Global Scholars program, which provides awards of up to $4,000 for faculty engaged in scholarship or curriculum development that helps prepare students for global leadership. He traveled to Chiang Mai, Thailand, in July 2018 to participate in a Global Village trip and was one of the faculty leaders for UE’s most recent trip to Chacala, Mexico.

As part of the predeparture class for the Mexico trip, Meacham collaborated with civil engineering professor Mark Valenzuela on exercises that teach students building techniques such as pouring concrete. Meacham and Valenzuela used the theater department’s scene shop as a work space to educate students on how to lay cinder block and mix mortar by hand. “Mark can tell us all the things we never knew we needed to know about the ratios of cement to sand and water,” Meacham says. With insights on how they can contribute safely and effectively, students often arrive at the build site with added confidence and develop a deeper appreciation for their role in the project and the value of service-learning.

Many faculty say that participating in a Global Village trip serves as a jumping-off point for students pursuing additional international experiences. Many students have volunteered for multiple international trips upon returning. For example, five of the eight students who went to Nicaragua in 2017 then traveled to Guatemala the next year through another Global Village trip.

Exploring Local Connections

The University of Evansville has collaborated with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity for more than 15 years. Students, faculty, and staff have contributed over 2,500 hours to aid the local organization in Evansville since fall 2017.

The local builds in Evansville and an alternative spring break to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have created prime opportunities for international students studying at UE to volunteer and get to know their peers and meet families in the community, further enhancing their experience in the country.

Adom Kouame, an international student from Côte d’Ivoire, spent her sophomore year spring break helping to build a pool deck for a woman who needed assistance in accessing her swimming pool for physical therapy. On top of learning and working alongside 
other UE students at the project site, Kouame had the chance to engage with local residents in Oak Ridge, visit the museum and other landmarks, and discover more about the city’s history, which was created as the site of a secret nuclear laboratory during World War II. While in Oak Ridge, Kouame was also encouraged to share stories about her own culture, bringing a bit of the Ivory Coast to Tennessee.

Framing Global Perspectives

Drawing connections between the global and the local is one of the most significant student outcomes of the UE Builds program. According to Wesley Milner, executive director of international programs, students are able to explore issues like income inequality and needs assessment by comparing and contrasting the build locations and Evansville.

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Ninety percent of the students who participated in Global Village trips have also worked on local projects in Evansville. “We’ve made this commitment that every time we go and build a house somewhere out in the world, we come back and we do just as much for our local community,” Carter says. 

John East, who graduated from the University of Evansville in 2017 with a degree in civil engineering, has traveled to Nicaragua and Mexico with the program. In addition to his day job as a civil engineer, East serves as an adjunct professor in UE’s Center for Innovation and Change and has teamed up with Valenzuela on a project looking at tiny homes as an affordable housing solution.

“Any opportunities to get involved with Habitat provide a constant reminder of how communities can come together in the fight against poverty. These Habitat experiences act as a source of inspiration for our…project mission…to relieve homelessness in Evansville,” East says.

He adds that “for students, the Habitat experiences help shape their perspective of global situations, as they are able to immerse themselves in communities that are often unlike their own. These moments help develop the perspective of the individual and their understanding as a global citizen.”

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University of Evansville

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Chrystal Holmes-Smith never thought education abroad would be an option. “Traditional study abroad programs just weren’t feasible [as] an education major,” says Holmes-Smith, who graduated from SUNY Buffalo State in 2015 with a degree in elementary education. “Having to do servicelearning and student teaching makes it difficult to spend a semester abroad.”

Influencing Future Generations

The chance for Holmes-Smith to go abroad came about through SUNY Buffalo State’s International Professional Development Schools (IPDS) Consortium program in Santiago, Chile. While abroad, HolmesSmith and her classmates spent 2 weeks learning Spanish and participating in cultural activities and another week working with Chilean teacher candidates to teach children English.

“My last day in the classroom was the most defining moment of the trip for me,” Holmes-Smith says. She worked one-on-one with a little girl who wanted to practice her English. They created sentences related to things that they had in common. At the end of class, the little girl asked to take a picture with Holmes-Smith and set it as the screensaver on her laptop. “On the way home, her teacher told me that this was a student who never participated,” Holmes-Smith says. “She usually seemed uninterested in class and never wanted to try speaking….I decided then that I [wanted] to teach abroad…[and] that I wanted to work with English language learners.”

Since that three-week experience through IPDS, Holmes-Smith has gone from being a teacher candidate who had never thought about traveling abroad to becoming a globally competent educator who has lived and worked in two different countries. She taught for a year in Honduras and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua. Now, as a fifth grade teacher in Harlem, New York, Holmes-Smith works with students with backgrounds from all over the world. “The IPDS experience…helped me become a better teacher for English language learners and a more culturally responsive educator,” she says. “Having the chance to be a language learner myself helped me to learn strategies that make it easier for language learners to comprehend.”

Navigating Diverse Classrooms

Holmes-Smith is one of more than 180 SUNY Buffalo State teacher candidates, along with 20 faculty members, who have participated in the IPDS program since it launched in Chile and Zambia in 2012. Since then, SUNY Buffalo State has established 45 partnerships in more than a dozen countries, including China, the Dominican Republic, England, Germany, Italy, Myanmar, and Rwanda. Additionally, discussions are currently underway to establish a partnership at the graduate level in Colombia. Each location is offered every other year to avoid competing for participants. Students who are unable to travel can participate in a virtual IPDS with a school in Honduras.

The IPDS program was born out of a need to prepare future teachers to work in increasingly diverse classrooms. SUNY Buffalo State faculty designed the program with a short-term travel component due to the difficulty of incorporating international experiences 
into the curriculum of teacher education programs. “Teacher education is notoriously difficult to internationalize because of the prescriptive nature of the state agencies that give teacher certifications,” says Robert Summers, assistant provost for global engagement. SUNY Buffalo State has found the answer in IPDS.

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Centering on Inclusive Programming

Founded in 1871 as the “Buffalo Normal School,” SUNY Buffalo State’s School of Education is one of the oldest teacher colleges in New York state. A large influx of immigrants and refugees to the larger Buffalo area over the last 10 years has further increased the need for teacher candidates to develop global competence in order to better serve students with diverse cultural backgrounds.

Ninety percent of the participants of the International Professional Development Schools program are women, and 25 percent identify as a member of an underrepresented group. “A large majority of our students are first-generation college students, and many have never traveled outside of the United States,” says professor Pixita del Prado Hill.

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Students enroll in a course the semester prior to traveling to help prepare them for a three-week servicelearning trip abroad in January or June. In addition to learning about the culture of their host country, students are asked to reflect on the language differences they might experience and how to adjust their teaching practices in classrooms where they might not have access to the same resources as they do in the United States.

Establishing a Lasting Impact

IPDS students visit schools, observe classrooms, and work with mentor teachers. The Siena, Italy, site is the only site offering student teaching opportunities at an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. At other study destinations, the SUNY Buffalo State teacher candidates often prepare English language lessons and engage in informal conversations with students. In some locations, participants live with local families and have the opportunity to engage with nonprofits in the community, further extending their cross-cultural exchanges.

Faculty at SUNY Buffalo State often remark that one of the most important elements of the IPDS program is helping teacher candidates understand what it is like to learn in a language that they might not understand. To support their work with local students, SUNY Buffalo State students traveling to Chile and the Dominican Republic spend part of their time in-country taking an intensive Spanish class tailored to their own proficiency level. “One of the most important impacts is around language learning and supporting that experience in a very compassionate way when they come back,” says del Prado Hill.

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The impact of the IPDS program has gone beyond the School of Education at SUNY Buffalo State. The Creative Studies Department, for instance, sponsors a trip to Yangon, Myanmar, during which students engage in an IPDS-supported project working with displaced Burmese children living at the Dha Maw Da Monastery School. Another example is the Anne Frank Project, which is facilitated by the SUNY Buffalo State Theater Department and implemented in various schools in Rwanda and Kenya. Participants apply drama-based education tools toward conflict resolution and teacher training.

Teacher candidates also participate in comparative education research while they are abroad. Students have completed projects on topics such as recess in different countries and comparisons of the use of native languages in IB schools in the United States and Italy. Upon return to Buffalo, the teacher candidates present their research findings to instructors and peers.

Music education major Kristine Murnieks worked with another student on a project looking at music as a tool for second language instruction, while studying in Torremaggiore, Italy. “We taught second grade students in English using a bilingual book we authored ahead of time,” says Murnieks, who graduated in 2018. “Collecting data for our research has really aided my understanding of pedagogical parallels for teaching language and music.”

Carrying Out the Vision of Faculty Stakeholders

The program’s international partnerships are largely faculty driven and entail collaboration with universities and schools in the host locations. Once the initial connections are established by individual faculty members, other professors are brought in to help make the partnerships sustainable. These partnerships provide access to unique learning opportunities for SUNY Buffalo State’s teacher candidates.

del Prado Hill developed the partnership with Universidad Mayor in Santiago while she completed a Fulbright fellowship to Chile in 2011. The leadership at SUNY Buffalo State and Universidad Mayor were strategic in identifying parameters to make the relationship reciprocal. Every other February, Universidad Mayor’s teaching training program sends its students and faculty to Buffalo for 3 weeks, giving SUNY Buffalo State students the opportunity to get to know Chilean students. del Prado Hill has also collaborated with Universidad Mayor faculty on a few projects. “They’ve contributed a chapter to a book that we’re in the process of publishing,” she says. “We also share resources and expertise.”

For another pivotal partnership, professor Hibajene Shandomo was instrumental in setting up the International Professional Development Schools program in her native Zambia. She used her own networks to develop partnerships with the University of Zambia, local schools, and an orphanage. “What our teacher candidates see, what they experience in a day of visiting these schools and teaching these students, is equivalent to many, many hours of reading a book about other countries,” Shandomo says. 

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As one of the nation’s premier public research institutions, West Virginia University (WVU) serves as an economic driver and knowledge base in a region of the United States where industry and population are declining. WVU has leveraged its strengths in areas such as public health, natural gas, and petroleum engineering to develop partnerships that aim to solve both local and global problems.

When the state of West Virginia was hit by a major flash flood in June 2016, WVU students, staff, and faculty came together to offer support to the devastated communities. “Within a few hours of knowing the flooding was occurring, our entire campus joined together and we turned one of our big empty spaces into a warehouse where we could [put] supplies,” says former provost Joyce McConnell. 

The largest group in the warehouse lending support were Engineers Without Borders students from India, she says. The students quickly jumped in to help organize supplies and coordinate relief efforts, drawing on their own experience with flooding in their native country. “It was this incredible moment to see what it means to have international students bring their expertise to a crisis in a place like West Virginia,” McConnell explains. 

Each year, WVU welcomes around 2,200 international students who contribute to the student body of nearly 30,000 across the three campuses. Most international students study at WVU’s main campus in Morgantown, a city of rolling hills situated along the banks of the Monongahela River. 

In a state with a dwindling college-aged population, WVU has looked to international and domestic nonresident students to bolster its student body. According to Stephen Lee, associate vice president for enrollment management, more than half of the freshman class come from abroad or out of state. “Everything we do relies on this unique enrollment profile in terms of who we recruit and how we recruit,” he says. “International is a key component of that.”

The presence of international and out-of-state students helps bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to a state that is largely homogeneous demographically. According to President E. Gordon Gee, West Virginians who enroll at WVU can essentially “study abroad by staying here” because of the cross-cultural exchanges they can have with international students arriving from 150 different countries. “Because many of our students come from very small towns in Appalachia, the notion of going to the university, let alone overseas, is a big step,” he says. “The international component of this institution is about what we do on campus, as well as what we do internationally.”

Centralizing International Engagement Efforts

WVU has a long history of international engagement— particularly in the Middle East due to the institution’s expertise in the petroleum industry—but many of its activities were decentralized until relatively recently. That was a trend that McConnell wanted to reverse when she became provost in 2014. “When I first came here in 1995, there was just this loose organization of people doing their own thing,” she says. “You could go to any college on campus and you would find all of these very interesting international collaborations going on, but the only thing that was centralized at all was the processing of visas.”

Support from Gordon Gee and McConnell fueled the push to consolidate WVU’s international activities under the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) in 2016. William Brustein, who had previously worked with Gordon Gee at The Ohio State University, was brought on as vice president for global strategies and international affairs to lead the newly minted OGA. The office now oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, intensive English programs, sponsored student services, and the Health Sciences Center Global Engagement Office. 

Under the direction of the OGA, WVU has prioritized two key approaches to internationalization: leveraging the institution’s strengths and building strong international partnerships. “We need to constantly remind ourselves of who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Gordon Gee says.

Brustein adds that drawing on WVU’s expertise in areas such as energy and medicine abroad is crucial to its land-grant mission. “Our faculty are developing research collaborations all around the world. We believe the international aspects of this research, whether it’s in health, energy, or forensics, can not only help people overseas, but will also help the people of the state of West Virginia and the future prosperity of the state,” Brustein says.

Strengthening Ties with Bahrain

One of WVU’s most successful international partnerships is with the Royal University for Women (RUW) in Bahrain. Founded in 2005 by four brothers who graduated from West Virginia University, RUW is the kingdom’s first private university for women. WVU has collaborated with RUW since 2009 to create student exchanges and faculty research opportunities. Faculty members from both universities have engaged in research collaborations in the fields of energy, water resources, health care, and women and gender studies. 

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In 2019, business and economics professor Susan Jennings Lantz took a group of 10 female students for a one-credit study abroad and cultural exchange trip to RUW over spring break. “Our students are able to get behind the scenes because they are staying in the residence hall,” Jennings Lantz says. “It’s a heavily gendered experience, but it’s unlike anything that our students have experienced.”

While she was in Bahrain, pre-med major Garima Agarwal says she realized just how different the economic and social landscape is between the Gulf Coast and Appalachia. “Here in West Virginia, we’re not used to that kind of glamor,” she says. “It was also my first time attending a mosque and learning about Islam.” Agarwal had the chance to participate in a debate about feminism with RUW students as well. “They have a very different approach to feminism than we do in the Western world,” she says. 

Agarwal, who graduated in May 2019, says that the experience will help inform her practice as a future doctor. “I understand their culture more closely now,” she explains. “As I see patients from that side of the world, I can take a more holistic approach to their care.”

The WVU-RUW partnership features other areas of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domain. RUW hosts a WVU civil and environmental engineering program, which launched in 2017. The program is WVU’s first full degree program offered abroad and has served as a model for the development of dual-degree programs in other countries such as China. RUW students take the same courses that are offered in Morgantown and have the option to study abroad in West Virginia for a semester or more, allowing for additional global learning and connections. The creation of such dual-degree programs involves continued support and input from stakeholders throughout the institutions.

The partnership extends to the highest levels of university leadership. President Gordon Gee serves on the Royal University for Women’s Board of Trustees, and other WVU administrators have offered their insights and support as RUW continues to grow. In 2018, David Stewart took a leave of absence from his position as associate vice president for global strategy and international affairs at WVU to serve as president of the Royal University for Women.

“I’m ‘on loan’ here for 2 years,” Stewart explains. “We did that to really cement the relationship between the two universities and to speed up the development of WVU offering other kinds of programs in the Middle East.”

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Investing in a Presence Abroad Through Global Portals

WVU’s partnership with the Royal University for Women has been the foundation of its engagement in the Middle East and has been a prototype for the development of its global portals strategy in other parts of the world. Brustein describes the global portals as “academic embassies” where WVU maintains a physical presence in the region. The portals facilitate student exchange and education abroad, faculty exchange and research collaboration, alumni engagement, and industry and state partnerships. Additionally, the portals allow WVU to offer development and training opportunities in areas such as energy and medicine. 

In November 2016, Bahrain became the site of WVU's first global portal. The WVU Health Sciences Center uses the portal to provide on-site training and certification for medical health professionals from the Middle East. Because it can be very expensive to send faculty and students to the United States and increasingly difficult to obtain visas, WVU has made training and services more accessible by offering them at RUW. An example is an advanced certificate in occupational medicine that is certified by the American Medical Association. The second global portal was launched in Shanghai, China, in July 2018 and is directed by a WVU alumnus from China. WVU is currently working with partners in South America to develop another portal representing Latin America and also plans to eventually establish a presence in Southeast Asia. 

Addressing the Barriers to Study Abroad

Approximately 750 domestic students study abroad every year through credit-bearing programs. Because nearly one-quarter of all WVU students are Pell-eligible, the institution has focused on making its education abroad programs as affordable as possible. Several years ago, the WVU Board of Governors approved a tuition waiver for faculty-led programs. “Instead of charging the standard university and college tuition fees, we only charge $50 per credit hour,” says Vanessa Yerkovich, director of education abroad.

She adds that for out-of-state students, participating in a faculty-led program can often be more affordable than taking a summer course on campus. The ASPIRE Office, which helps WVU students apply for fellowships and graduate school, also works with Pell-eligible students to apply for Gilman Scholarships. Since 2004 when the Gilman program launched, 63 WVU students have been awarded Gilman Scholarships. 

Another way in which WVU has strived to make education abroad a reality for students is by providing its own scholarships. The John Chambers College of Business and Economics offers dedicated scholarships from a donor to support students who study in Brazil, China, India, or the United Arab Emirates. According to professor Li Wang, those scholarships are specifically targeted at non-European destinations. “We want to make sure students really expand their vision and get to know these emerging markets,” she says. 

Wang designed a faculty-led program to China that includes visits to both Chinese businesses and U.S. companies operating in China. Kristin Moro, who graduated in 2018 with a degree in business administration and information systems management, caught the study abroad bug after traveling with Wang to China. Her second study abroad program to India helped solidify her desire to work in the technology industry. “The first city we went to was Bangalore, …also known as the Silicon Valley of India,” Moro says. “India is a technology hub, and it was so interesting to me as someone interested in tech to see how other parts of the world conduct the same types of business.”

Beyond the financial factor, WVU’s study abroad team and faculty members work to help dispel some of the assumptions and cultural barriers discouraging students from going abroad. Professor Lisa Di Bartolomeo says that for many Appalachian students, it can be a huge leap just to attend WVU. “People throughout the state of West Virginia see Morgantown as the big city,” she says. “If you come from a place where your high school graduated 200 people, just coming here is a huge, scary step.”

To help mitigate students’ apprehension over the unknown, WVU’s orientation places focus on the transition of place and emphasizes the importance of diverse environments. Additionally, the Global Living-Learning Community (LLC) provides the setting for domestic and international students to interact and connect over lived experiences. Open to all students who are interested in learning about other cultures, the Global LLC can often spark a desire to go abroad. 

Elevating Intercultural Knowledge with Global Mountaineers

WVU also recently established Global Mountaineers, a curricular certificate that encourages students to take advantage of global opportunities on campus and abroad. Di Bartolomeo, who coordinates the certificate, began by garnering the support of deans and other stakeholders across campus. Students complete an introductory and capstone global competence course, take approved core courses, meet a language requirement, and study abroad or do an international internship.

The goal of the certificate program is to add value without increasing time to degree. “I was really careful to include courses that either count for the general education or that will count toward majors where students are likely to find an interest,” Di Bartolomeo says. The certificate was launched in fall 2018, and graduate Courtney Watson was the first WVU student to earn it. “It feels very rewarding to be the first person to graduate with a Global Mountaineer Certificate because WVU is such a big school with a rich history and a lot of students, and because in today’s world, global awareness is a critical skill to have,” she says. 

Di Bartolomeo approached Watson about earning the certificate because she had already met most of the requirements as a Russian minor and three-time study abroad student. “We both agreed that it would strengthen [my] global education because it would combine my education abroad experiences, my Russian language skills, and my research skills into a nice certification, which helped when I was applying to jobs,” Watson says. 

Providing a Productive Environment for International Students

Along with expanding and promoting its internationalization portfolio, WVU has recharged its international student recruitment strategy over the last decade to offset declining enrollment from in-state students, diversify its student body, and promote cross-cultural understanding. In particular, the institution has been able to leverage its expertise in areas such as petroleum and natural gas engineering to attract students from around the world. West Virginia University offers one of only four ABET-accredited programs encompassing both petroleum and natural gas engineering in the country. 

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WVU’s international student recruitment efforts have seen an increase in enrollment from around 1,200 students in 2007–08 to approximately 2,300 in 2017–18. The top sending countries are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Oman. 

Located within the Office of Global Affairs, International Students & Scholars Services (ISSS) offers support to all international students on campus. In January 2017, WVU created its Office of Sponsored Students to provide extra support to its population of sponsored students, who make up more than 70 percent of all international undergraduates and almost half of all graduate students. “We started it because we realized that sponsors and their students have unique needs that other international students don’t have,” says Cindy Teets, director of sponsored student services. 

Farhan Ahmed, an Indian student who graduated in 2019 with a degree in sport and exercise psychology, appreciates the level of service he received from ISSS and OGA during his time at WVU. “My friends at bigger universities talk about how many international students there are, but there’s not really events going on,” he says. “But here, the environment is so inclusive and so open.”

Extending and Internationalizing Health Sciences

Another draw for international students applying to WVU has been its extensive health sciences programming and specialized training. The university Health Sciences Center runs the state’s largest health system, providing increased access to health care in a largely rural region of the country. The Health Sciences Center runs five schools: dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health. 

Operating within the Health Sciences Center, the Global Engagement Office (GEO) coordinates all international engagement related to health sciences. “We live in one very small world today in respect to health issues,” says professor Chris Martin, who directs the GEO. “Our students these days have a far more contextual understanding of global health than their predecessors did.”

WVU’s health sciences programs provide training to medical and dental students from abroad. Building on the institution’s broader engagement in the Middle East, the Health Sciences Center hosts up to eight Kuwaiti students per year who complete their undergraduate degrees at WVU and then apply to WVU’s medical or dental schools. “They can be here for up to a decade. It’s a nice model because it gives them a lot of time to adjust to different educational systems. By the time they hit medical or dental school, they’re prepared,” Martin says. 

Zeinab Atiah is a third-year student at the School of Dentistry who started at WVU as an undergraduate after receiving a scholarship from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE). “West Virginia University was one of the accredited universities that the MOHE accepts…[and] the best clinical experience that I would possibly get was in the USA,” she says. “Faculty members are always available for us and taught us how to be professional with our patients and build up the skills necessary to become a dentist.”

WVU also trains 19 Saudi Arabian residents and fellows in various graduate medical programs. The residents graduate from medical school in Saudi Arabia and then do specialized training in fields such as internal medicine, pathology, psychiatry, and robotic cardiovascular surgery. According to Martin, WVU’s Health Sciences Center has designed its programs for international professionals to fill unused training capacity. “We’re not displacing our usual pool of applicants. For example, psychiatry has accreditation to take seven residents per year. But we only have funding for six, so that the seventh slot is available to those sponsored students,” Martin says. 

As is the case for the larger institution, taking part in international networks and leveraging partnerships has been central to the Health Science Center’s internationalization strategy. “We’re a small university in terms of financial resources. We don’t have endowments, we don’t have Fogarty [global health] grants that a lot of other large universities do. So we’ve tried to work with national networks to get that coordination,” Martin says.

The institution participates in the Association of American Medical Colleges Visiting Student Learning Opportunities program at global and domestic sites, which allows medical students to take electives while trying to get into residency programs. In addition to sending students abroad through the program, WVU is the second most active site in the United States for hosting international students. 

Through that network, WVU sent a group of neurologists to Guatemala to provide training to health care workers including nurses, social workers, and case managers in the early diagnosis of disorders such as depression, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. Those frontline health care workers can then find additional support from WVU physicians through telemedicine, which uses technology to diagnose and treat patients remotely.

Allie Karshenas, associate vice president of clinical operations and institutional advancement, says that the engagement of health sciences abroad is beneficial not only to the partners abroad, but also the home state. “By working with these small countries that are impoverished and under-resourced, we are able to internalize those values for our learning,” he says. “Most of what we learn can come back in the form of improving our own processes, access to health care, and access to technology in our own state.”
 

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As one of the oldest public universities in the United States, Miami University welcomed its first students in 1824. Today, the institution brings a global outlook to its three campuses in southwestern Ohio through its curricular requirements, robust faculty-led programs, study abroad center in Luxembourg, and comprehensive support for international students and scholars.

In October 2018, more than 900 alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Miami University gathered in the Château de Differdange, a fifteenth-century castle located in a village just 20 minutes from Luxembourg City. The event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center (MUDEC), which has served as a study abroad site for Miami students since 1968. 

The center was founded by alumnus John E. Dolibois, who was born in Luxembourg, immigrated to the United States, and enrolled as a student at Miami University in 1938. Shortly after graduation, Dolibois was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He interrogated Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials and later served as a U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. In 1947, he became Miami University’s first full-time alumni secretary. Dolibois took on several more roles at Miami before he was named vice president for university relations in 1981. Throughout his life, Dolibois continued to work to strengthen ties between Miami University and countries such as Luxembourg.

At the 50th Jubilee Celebration, Miami University President Gregory P. Crawford bestowed an honorary degree upon the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg Prince Guillaume, whose father and grandfather had also received the same honor. 
“We have had tremendous support from Differdange and Luxembourg,” says Phyllis Callahan, who retired in July 2019 after serving almost 5 years as provost. “We also have a broad base of extraordinarily devoted alumni who spent time there over the years. It gives us a foothold in a part of the world where there are opportunities for our students to learn.”

The establishment of MUDEC, along with more than 140 faculty-led programs to countries all over the world, has helped Miami University make its mark in the field of international education. Miami’s undergraduate study abroad programs rank among the top five in the nation among public doctoral universities. 

It is a distinction that the institution has held for several years, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors report. The university also hosts more than 3,000 international students every year, and it offers a myriad of curricular and cocurricular opportunities for faculty, students, and staff to engage with the world. 

“The international efforts here are not a single domain of one college or one unit or one department,” says Crawford. “It’s all throughout our culture here at Miami, which is very exciting.”

Nurturing a Culture of Internationalization

At the helm of Miami’s study abroad and international education programs is the Global Initiatives division, directed by Cheryl Young, who serves as assistant provost and senior international officer. While Miami University has a long tradition of international engagement, Global Initiatives is relatively new. The division, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, Ohio, was created in 2013 as part of a strategic reorganization of globally focused academic support units. Then-provost Conrado “Bobby” Gempesaw wanted to centralize the university’s international activities, bringing them together under the Global Initiatives umbrella. The division now oversees study abroad, international student and scholar services, continuing education, the Confucius Institute, and the Center for American and World Cultures (CAWC). 

“Provost Gempesaw asked me to develop a plan for comprehensive internationalization at Miami University,” Young says. “We brought all of these units together with the plan to make sure that we infuse intercultural and global dimensions throughout the university.”

An essential component of Miami’s internationalization efforts is the Global Miami Plan (GMP) for Liberal Education, which outlines a six-credit global perspectives requirement and a three-credit intercultural perspectives requirement that serve as part of the university’s general education courses. Students can take one of more than 80 approved globally focused courses on campus or participate in education abroad. 

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Many students also use study abroad to fulfill their capstone or thematic sequence requirements in the GMP. 

“It is designed to help students understand and creatively transform human culture and society by giving the students the tools to ask questions, examine assumptions, exchange views with others, and become better global citizens,” according to the university website. 

Building on the GMP, Miami recently launched a Global Readiness Certificate that has both academic and cocurricular requirements. Coordinated by the CAWC, the first cohort will be piloted in fall 2019 in the College of Education, Health and Society. Approximately 12 to 15 students will go through the orientation, attend globally focused or multicultural on-campus activities, participate in a community engagement or servicelearning project, complete six credits of off-campus study, and take specific approved courses.

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“A big piece of it is that we don’t want students to just check the boxes. They actually have to reflect on what they’re doing and engage with global opportunities in multiple ways,” says program coordinator Alicia Castillo Shrestha. 

Advancing a Global Vision Through Study Abroad

More than half of all Miami students spend time off campus through study abroad or study away in the United States by the time they graduate. In both the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years, over 2,000 students went abroad. The institution aims to have at least 60 percent of its students study off campus by 2020. The vast majority of students who study abroad participate in one of Miami’s short-term faculty-led programs, which have grown exponentially since the introduction of a winter term in 2014. Most of the university’s faculty-led programs count toward the Global Miami Plan’s global perspectives requirements. 

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Interactive media studies major Brian Velasquez completed a faculty-led program at the University of Calabria in Italy. In addition to a class taught by a Miami faculty member, he took a coding class focused on knowledge representation that was taught by a faculty member from the local university. “I thought that was pretty cool to get a professor with a different teaching style,” Velasquez says. “The coursework was a lot different. Rather than having class two or three times per week, we had class every day,” he adds. “It was an eye-opener to see a different way that people live.”

Velasquez studied abroad immediately after his freshman year, which he says had a huge impact on his personal growth and understanding of different backgrounds. “I definitely look back and appreciate the people that I met because of how far I’ve come socially and professionally in the classroom,” Velasquez says. 

Bolstering Miami University’s Profile in Europe

Approximately 10 percent of all Miami study abroad students travel to MUDEC, which can host up to 120 students per semester and another 40 in the summer. Students stay with host families in the local community and participate in a study tour that takes them to other parts of Europe. 

The majority of courses taught at MUDEC meet the Global Miami Plan’s general education requirements and have a European focus. Each year, two Miami faculty members travel to MUDEC for one semester, and four others teach an eight-week “sprint course,” which entails an accelerated class format and a brief study tour. All other courses are taught by local European adjunct faculty.

While most Miami students studying in Luxembourg take general education courses, some schools and departments have used the opportunity to develop specialized programs for their majors. Miami’s Farmer School of Business, for instance, offers the FSB LUX Plus, a summer business program based at the Luxembourg center that also takes students to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy. Additionally, cohorts of Miami architecture students get the chance to travel to MUDEC where they can take the general education classes offered to all students and then major-specific architecture classes. 

Deepening Community Relations

Miami University’s long-standing engagement in Luxembourg has allowed the institution to develop deep ties with Differdange that go beyond MUDEC. In 2017, Oxford and Differdange signed a sister cities agreement, which has contributed to internationalization on campus and in the surrounding communities. For example, local grocery stores in Oxford stock Bofferding, the leading beer in Luxembourg. The brewery’s chief executive officer Georges Lentz is a Miami University alumnus. 

Over in Luxembourg, École Internationale de Differdange et Esch-Sur-Alzette (EIDE), a local public school that offers curriculum in English, has served as a student teaching site for Miami University teacher candidates for the last 4 years. The majority of students enrolled at EIDE are English language learners (ELLs). “This creates a perfect site for placement of Miami’s teacher education candidates who can improve their ELL teaching skills while also getting an authentic international study abroad experience,” says education professor James Shiveley, who also oversees the MUDEC Curriculum Committee. 

Under Shiveley’s supervision, nine teacher education and special education undergraduates from Miami University planned and ran two weeklong day camps for ELL elementary and middle school students on site in Luxembourg in July 2019. The Miami students, who enrolled in a three-credit course, received free housing from MUDEC. Financial aid for the Miami students was provided by the College of Education Partnership fund and MUDEC, with additional financial support coming from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education and the city of Differdange. 

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Private donations from alumni who studied at MUDEC have also provided scholarships for students from Luxembourg to study in Oxford. Claudia Zaunz, a journalism and English literature double major from Luxembourg, is one of the current recipients. She says she didn’t realize how important Luxembourg’s close connection with Miami University would be until she was on campus. “When I arrived at Miami during orientation, the campus was nearly empty,” she says. “I walked into the Armstrong Student Center and saw the sign: Lux Café. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The windows feature the text of ‘Ons Hémecht,’ the national anthem, and there are pictures on the wall of Luxembourg City…. It made it so much easier to make Miami [my] home away from home! Lux Café is my favorite spot to study for exams.”

Welcoming Students From Around the World

Zaunz is one of approximately 3,000 international students who are currently pursuing their undergraduate education at Miami University. For the last several years, the institution’s investment of time and resources in international undergraduate student recruitment has paid off, growing enrollment numbers from fewer than 500 students in 2009 to over 3,000 in 2018, an increase of more than 500 percent. 

Undergraduate international recruitment is housed in the Office of Admissions, which has four dedicated international recruiters. There were fewer than 100 international undergraduates on campus when Aaron Bixler, senior associate director for international enrollment, started at Miami in 2003. Today, 85 percent of Miami’s 3,000 international students are Chinese. A significant number of students also come from India, Vietnam, South Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. 

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Bixler says that part of Miami’s early success with recruitment in China was because the school quickly expanded to secondary markets outside of Beijing and Shanghai and hired a full-time recruiter based in China. “Having someone there on the ground freed us up a bit to try to explore new markets,” Bixler says. 

Combining Academic and Linguistic Support

To further expand the recruitment pipeline, Miami University established a bridge program in 2011 for international students who are academically qualified but need some extra language support. The American Culture & English (ACE) program, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, offers students with a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) score between 65 and 79 conditional admission. Students in the bridge program take courses in speaking and listening, reading and writing, and social science, as well as an elective that counts toward one of their general education requirements. 

According to director Carol Olausen, the program is built around an intensive advising model that helps students to develop skills for academic success. Xiaoyi Huang, an early childhood education major, shares her experience: “I love the ACE program because it’s not only a smooth transition from China, but it [also] kind of blew my mind because of how English textbooks and daily life conversations are so different.”

Students are also required to participate in a minimum of eight extracurricular events during the semester. “It helps them become comfortable with campus resources,” Olausen explains. Zhuoran Bao, a Chinese student who started in the ACE program, notes, “I had more time to get involved on campus, like volunteering or joining organizations like dance club.” She adds that she met U.S. students through the program, which was important to her as a media and culture major. 

Students who first complete the ACE program have been found to achieve better outcomes than their international peers who did not start in the program. They have a retention rate of 73 percent compared with 68 percent for international students as a whole, according to Olausen. 

The success of the ACE model led to the development of tailored programming for all international students, many of whom struggle with speaking English and listening despite potentially having high TOEFL scores. “Because TOEFL scores often show you more of passive skills rather than productive skills, we identify students through a speaking test administered to all incoming international students,” Olausen says. Students who struggle with speaking and comprehension are automatically placed in a transition course to further develop those skills.

In addition to the ACE program, Miami University has an English Language Center at its Middletown campus, located about 20 miles from Oxford. The center serves approximately 300 students per year, including during the summer. Many students who complete the intensive English program later enroll at Miami as degree-seeking students. The English Language Center also offers a summer program for around 75 English language learners enrolled at local high schools. 

Rewriting the Rules of Language Learning

In 2018, Miami launched the English Language Learner Writing Center, which is coordinated by Larysa Bobrova. She hired 10 consultants who collaborate with multilingual writers and are trained in second language acquisition theories. The idea is not to offer proofreading or editing services, but to help non-native English speakers become more aware of their own writing process. “We discuss strategies that our consultants can use to help students to correct their own errors,” Bobrova says. 

Bobrova also offers training for faculty members in how to design and give feedback on assignments for English language learners. Moreover, education students taking courses in ELL instruction have been able to observe writing consultations at the center to gain skills and insights they can apply to their future careers as educators. 

Like Miami’s overall approach to internationalization, the mission of the multilingual writing center is to be inclusive and welcoming to all students. “Writing persuasively in a language does not imply being a native speaker,” Bobrova says. “This is something that both our students and our faculty need to know in order to make their pedagogy inclusive and to celebrate the diversity of language and cultures.”

While Harrison Bontrager had certain goals in mind as he traveled to Sydney, Australia, as part of a study abroad program at Kirkwood Community College, he had no idea it would lead to an international career in architecture and design. The study abroad program, led by Kirkwood professor Jillissa Moorman, took students on a two-week tour of architecture and design firms across Australia. 

During the program development stage, Bontrager contacted Moorman and asked if she could include a visit to Alexander & CO., Bontrager’s favorite architecture firm, on the itinerary. This outing had significant outcomes for Bontrager. “After touring their space and getting to chat with their principal, I was offered an internship, which has turned into a position as a designer,” he explains.

Bontrager returned to Iowa to finish one more semester at Kirkwood and then completed his associate’s degree by working with Moorman remotely. “I’m not going to say he can’t continue because he’s around the world,” says Moorman, who coordinates Kirkwood’s interior design program. 

It is the passion and support of faculty members like Moorman that have helped Kirkwood earn its reputation for study abroad programming for community college students. Each year, Kirkwood offers approximately 20 faculty-led programs across multiple disciplines. The Institute of International Education ranks the college fifth nationally in the number of community college students it sends abroad.

Offering a Central Hub for Global Experiences

Kirkwood’s study abroad programs are run through its International Programs (IP) Department, located on the college’s main campus in Cedar Rapids. The department also manages international enrollment management, international student services, English language acquisition, international partnerships, international grants and projects, and faculty and staff development. IP offers a centralized office for global engagement and is intentionally situated within academic affairs to facilitate interaction with all areas of the college. The department’s mission is to have “every faculty, staff, and student at Kirkwood engage in an intercultural experience."

Dawn Wood, dean of international programs, says that this mission is particularly important for Kirkwood as a community college because the vast majority of students stay in eastern Iowa after graduation. Thus, the college takes a broad, long-term outlook on its internationalization efforts. “These are people who are going to live in our community and give us the advantage we need to be globally competitive,” she says. 

When President Lori Sundberg joined Kirkwood in 2018, one of the first things she noticed was how internationalized the college was compared with her previous institutions. “It really is pervasive across the campus, from individual courses to opportunities for students and faculty outside of the classroom,” she says. 

John Henik, associate vice president for academic affairs, says that the college has been engaged internationally since he started at Kirkwood more than 30 years ago. Kirkwood was the fiscal agent and host for Community Colleges for International Development— an association made up of community, technical, and vocational institutions dedicated to creating globally engaged learning environments—from the late 1980s until 2013 and remains a member of the organization’s board. 

To support Kirkwood’s global efforts, the International Programs Department has always had its own budget allocated out of the college’s general fund. Dedicated funding for international activities is essential because new programs at community colleges are often seen as taking away scarce resources, according to Henik. While some specific projects are grant funded, the majority of the department’s budget comes from general funds. 

“There is a commitment to international programs, just like another department like allied health or business,” he says. “That is a really important move for the sustainability of the department.”

Enhancing Professional Development with the Global Service Award

Another aspect of Kirkwood’s internationalization strategy has been to engage stakeholders throughout the institution. Kirkwood has created professional development opportunities for staff, faculty, and administrators through the Global Service Award (GSA), which provides funding for staff to join students on international service-learning trips. The GSA was created in 2012 after former college president Mick Starcevich participated in a service-learning program to Guatemala with dental hygiene professor Lisa Hebl. Starcevich was so moved by the experience that the two sat down at dinner one night and sketched out on a napkin what the GSA might entail. “He didn’t expect [that the experience] was going to impact him as much as it did, and he wanted to make it possible for more people on campus to do it,” Hebl says. 

Full-time faculty and staff who are employed at Kirkwood for at least 3 years are eligible to apply for the award, which is competitive and provides full funding for the trip. While abroad, they participate alongside the students and support the lead faculty. Upon return to campus, the awardees complete an assessment, take part in events where they share their experience with colleagues, and develop projects to integrate what they learned into the classroom or their daily work.

Wood says it is important to give staff a chance to travel because they then become champions for education abroad. “Our students talk more to the people who are sitting at the front—that’s our office assistant, our admissions team, our counselors,” she says.

Five to six faculty and staff receive the GSA each year. Since the program was launched, more than 40 Kirkwood faculty and staff have engaged in service-learning programs in 10 different countries. 

International programs office coordinator Maria Moore traveled to Lima, Peru, as a GSA recipient where she and the students volunteered at an elder care facility and at a school. Moore says the experience gave her a new perspective on her work for the International Programs Department. “I really learned the value of students going abroad, because I think too many people get too entrenched in their own culture and they don’t want to venture out to see what else is out there in the world,” she says.

Making Study Abroad Accessible

Kirkwood’s enrollment is made up of many nontraditional students: older students returning to college, first-generation students, part-time students, low-income students, technical students, rural students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds. Approximately 34 percent of its students were Pell-eligible in the 2017–18 academic year. For many of these populations, education abroad poses particular challenges, but the International Programs Department does everything it can to make education abroad a possibility for anyone who wants to take advantage of it. In 2017–18, Kirkwood sent 151 students overseas out of a total full-time undergraduate population of approximately 15,000.

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By developing its own study abroad programs, the college is able to keep the costs down. All program fees, including the flight, are built into the cost of the program. “When all of us are designing these study abroad programs, it’s about quality, but also looking at cost-effective measures to make sure that students can afford it,” says study abroad adviser Ken Nesbett. “Even when faculty are proposing programs, we have the mindset of, ‘How will this be accessible for students without sacrificing quality?’”

Kirkwood works to break down some of the financial barriers by offering more than 90 percent of its study abroad participants $1,000 to $2,000 each as part of its Global Advantage Scholarships for faculty-led programs, totaling more than $150,000 in funding. Kirkwood is also a top producer of Gilman Awards, which are available to Pell-eligible students, among associate’s colleges. Six Kirkwood students received Gilman Awards in 2017–18.

Kayla Acosta, an early childhood education major, was one of Kirkwood’s recent Gilman awardees and a recipient of the Global Advantage Scholarship. She was able to study abroad in Australia and participate in a service-learning program to Cambodia. “There’s no way financially I’d be able to ever study abroad without a scholarship. It’s just not doable with working and being able to just up and leave everything,” she says.

In Australia, Acosta toured early childhood education centers and learned how they incorporate indoor and outdoor play into the curriculum. “I was able to bring a lot of that back here. I already work at a preschool currently, so I did a lot of training with my staff on how to better incorporate play,” she says.

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Collaborating Through the Global Education Network

For both of her education abroad programs, Acosta joined other students from Australia, Canada, and Singapore who attend institutions that are part of the Global Education Network (GEN), a consortium of four schools that Kirkwood has been a part of since 2001. Acosta and her peers had the chance to interact through established channels prior to departure, allowing for some relationship building among the participants. “We had met prior through Zoom, and when we got off the plane we saw giant groups of us that all looked lost,” she explains. Students from across the GEN consortium have the opportunity to not only learn from their host community, but each other as well.

GEN is a partnership between Kirkwood and the Box Hill Institute in Australia, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada, and Institute of Technical Education (ITE) in Singapore. GEN partners share similarities in their vocational and technical curricula, such as auto technology, welding, graphic design, veterinary technician, and early childhood education. The collaboration of these four institutions has resulted in hundreds of student, faculty, and staff exchanges; virtual exchanges; global learning programs focused on diverse curriculum areas; and joint faculty and staff professional development. 

Henik acts as the representative for the GEN consortium at the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics, an international network of colleges delivering workforce education. He says that while each institution brings its own strengths to GEN, they collaborate on the curriculum and plan joint servicelearning programs. “One of the parts of our strategic plan is that we’re sharing best practices and learning from each other,” Wood says. Kirkwood has, for example, developed medical simulation labs modeled after those at ITE.

Together, the four institutions contribute to the network’s operating budget, develop a strategic plan, and determine and assess key performance indicators. Every other year, one partner institution hosts a planning conference that includes the campus presidents. Kirkwood hosted the planning conference in June 2019. 

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Each institution hosts students and faculty from the other partners every year. Kirkwood alumnus Travis Riggan and other students from GEN took a project management course focused on the Jones County Fair, an annual event in Iowa that showcases local agricultural products and livestock. Students worked in multicultural teams and presented their projects to the fair board at the end of the class. 

Riggan says it was a unique experience to be able to take the visiting students to a county fair: “We got to show international students from Canada, Australia, and Singapore our culture. They’ve never been to a fair where people bash demo cars, showcase cows, and [have] fried food galore.” 

Internationalizing Career and Technical Education

Participation in the Global Education Network has helped Kirkwood internationalize its career and technical disciplines through its various student exchanges and other collaborations. At Kirkwood, around 50 percent of students are studying with the intent to transfer to a four-year institution. The remaining half complete a one- or two-year degree before entering the local workforce.

To meet students’ needs, Kirkwood has developed faculty-led programs in fields such as agriculture, construction management, and culinary arts. The architectural technology program takes students to Germany to learn about green building practices, and nursing and allied health students have participated in service programs in Belize, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Kirkwood’s culinary arts program runs a three-week course at Florence University of the Arts in Italy that allows students to take lab courses or intern at a restaurant. 

Students enrolled in Kirkwood’s agricultural sciences program get the chance to visit Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in Lavras, Brazil, over spring break. Professor Scott Ermer says that the program balances between academic and cultural activities. “The majority of the students that we have taken have never been outside the country before,” he says. “To immerse them in another, non-English-speaking culture is a game changer for them. You can just see the growth in 12 days.”

The program explores issues related to small-scale agriculture and encourages students to compare and contrast farming practices between Iowa and Brazil. “We spend a day on coffee production, so we drive through miles and miles of coffee. Just like you drive through miles and miles of corn here in Iowa. So, coffee is our corn. Our students learn to look at that as a cash commodity and gain a different perspective when they’re drinking that cup of coffee,” Ermer says. 

Justin Shields, who graduated from Kirkwood in May 2019, says Brazil was the first place he traveled to outside of the United States. The experience was so eyeopening that he plans to study abroad again after he transfers to Iowa State University in fall 2019. 
“Brazil has developed into an agriculture stronghold, and they’re one of our biggest competitors from the global trading standpoint,” Shields says. “It was just incredible to see the mountainous regions and the cattle. You could see them planting crops on such steep slopes that I never imagined was even possible.” 

While the group was in Lavras, students from UFLA served as the tour guides. “When we were getting ready to leave Lavras to head to Rio, there were people who were almost in tears because we were leaving such good friends. And it was just incredible to me that you could build a relationship that strong that quickly,” Shields says.

Diversifying the Campus Through International Student Recruitment

In addition to its efforts to send students abroad, Kirkwood has focused on welcoming international students to its campuses. From 2005 to 2015, Kirkwood’s international student enrollment increased from 174 to 399. Since then, Kirkwood has experienced a decline in international enrollment, forcing a reexamination of its enrollment strategies. Kirkwood’s recruitment efforts now target partnerships in Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries. 

To diversify its international student population, the college has also concentrated on recruiting more sponsored students from programs such as the Community College Initiative Program, the Thomas Jefferson Scholarship Program, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, and Science Without Borders. 

Still, one of the benefits of having a relatively small international student population is that Kirkwood has been able to personalize the support it provides each student. “I came from an institution where we had 4,000 international students,” says international student adviser Shannon Ingleby. “I couldn’t tell you a single name of any student, compared to Kirkwood where I know all the students. I get to interact with them all the time and spend a ton of time with them.”

Many international students at Kirkwood are active members of the campus community. Mathlida Mola came to the United States from Kenya in 2016 to pursue her associate’s degree in accounting. She was selected as the commencement speaker for the 2019 graduating class because of her work on the international student leadership team, which helps with orientation and organizes activities for international students. 

“I was extremely happy to represent my international student family as the commencement speaker,” Mola says. “It was an honor to share about my experience at Kirkwood as an international student.”

The English Language Acquisition (ELA) Department has provided an important service to the Cedar Rapids area over the years. More than 600 students are involved in the intensive English course sequence targeted at English language learners. While some students are on F-1 visas, the majority are immigrants and refugees who live in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding communities. “We have a five-level English course sequence. They are all courses that prepare students for college-level coursework or whatever certificate coursework they want to take at Kirkwood,” says instructor Betsy Baertlein. “All of our students have some sort of academic goal when they come to us.”

Kirkwood has also been able to leverage its distance learning technology to teach ELA courses to high school students in Brazil by using the same online platform it uses to offer dual enrollment classes to Iowa high school students. “There’s no difference between us communicating between here and Chicago or here and Brazil,” says Todd Prusha, executive dean of distance learning. “It’s been a great partnership.”

Kirkwood ELA instructors have been offering online English courses to Brazilian high school students for the last 7 years. In the course of the partnership, an ELA instructor did a site visit in Brazil and trained local community members on how to administer an oral proficiency exam. Kirkwood instructors have also been able to travel with agriculture students to Brazil over spring break and meet their online students in person. 

Renewing the Commitment to Comprehensive Internationalization

Kirkwood is currently in the process of constructing a new $60 million student center. “The college really wanted us front and center in our new student center because of its focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion,” Wood says. “We want all groups to feel welcomed and have a space to interact and engage.”

Once the building is completed in 2020, the International Programs Department will occupy a prominent location in the new space, along with other student resource centers. The goal is to better integrate international students and other groups into the larger campus community.

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