Scholar Orientation Model Program

Partially Sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State

Welcome to NAFSA’s model program resource site featuring International Scholar Orientation Programs. We hope the information presented here will assist you in developing and expanding your own international scholar orientations.

Partially sponsered by the Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs of The United States Department of State Orientation of new international scholars can take different forms. Some institutions put their emphasis on pre-arrival materials. Some rely more on an arrival packet. Some use a post arrival presentation as their main way to communicate information with their scholars. Most use a combination of these. All forms will be presented here to provide you with a picture of what various institutions are doing to orient their scholars.

We have listed what participating institutions sent of their orientation programs, with links to those materials that were provided. Please use this Web site as a basis for creating an orientation program or garnering new ideas for improving or expanding your existing program. By sharing ideas, we help each other and all programs benefit.

For this project, funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State, we are pleased to feature models from fourteen institutions who were generous enough to share all or part of their international scholar orientation programs with us.

Pre-Arrival Materials

The following schools offer pre-arrival materials that are sent to the scholar before arriving at their institution:

Arrival Materials

Arrival packets are materials packaged in a folder and given to the scholar upon their arrival at the International Office:

Orientation Presentations

Once the scholar arrives on campus, most but not all of the institutions have some kind of orientation to provide important information. The types of programs vary from Power Point to overheads to handouts, as well as from formal presentations to informal answering of specific questions scholars might have. The orientation might be daily or weekly or twice a month and lasting from one to several hours. There are many ways to orient new scholars.