Program Development and Delivery

With the University of San Diego’s (USD) Spanish Renaissance–style architecture, sunny climate, gardens in flower year round, and postcard view of Mission Bay, it might seem hopeless to convince students to tear themselves away to study abroad. But nearly three-quarters of the undergraduates do so and, befitting USD’s religious identity, many jump at opportunities to perform service in South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, and elsewhere. “One of our distinguishing marks is that we take seriously the need to become global citizens,” said former President Mary Lyons. “As a Catholic university that belongs to a worldwide network that has global outreach, global presence, and pays attention to global concerns, it comes naturally to us.”

Today’s USD is the product of a 1972 union between colleges for women and men built after World War II on a hilltop called Alcalá Park that sits 22 miles from the border with Mexico. The founding Sacred Heart nuns modeled the women’s college after the University of Alcalá in Spain, professing a belief that those attracted by its beauty would also find truth and goodness. The college has been under lay control since the merger and only half the student body is Catholic. Undergraduates must take philosophy and two religious studies classes. Kuwaiti student Khaled Alaskar, a mechanical engineering major, initially regarded the requirement as a burden, “but I learned a lot about different religions. USD does a good job at addressing how religion is important in people’s lives without enforcing it.” 

Expanding the Global Footprint

Lyons, a former captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve and president of the College of Saint Benedict (a 2012 Simon Award winner) and the California Maritime Academy, has just retired. She drove two, multiyear strategic planning efforts during the past 12 years that both placed greater emphasis on international study and research. An International Center headed by an associate provost was created in 2007, bringing three separate study abroad offices under one roof. A 2011 strategic plan set a goal of “expanding USD’s global presence” and developing a “footprint” in major cities abroad to promote international partnerships, exchanges, and collaborations.

In August 2014 it opened a 10,000-square-foot USD Madrid Center with classrooms, meeting and study spaces, and facilities equipped with videoconferencing and high-speed connections to the home campus. The university spent $400,000 to open the center near Retiro Park and the Prado museum. Lyons said it represented the culmination of a decade of efforts “to graduate men and women who are truly global citizens.”

USD had already been sending 90 students to learn Spanish, live with host families, and take other courses each fall in the Spanish capital. The center now has two administrators and a large roster of local faculty teaching classes that run the gamut from art history to business to political science. It is also home to summer programs for the business and education graduate schools.

Denise Dimon, associate provost for international affairs, said the goal is to enroll 200 students each year at the USD Madrid Center—115 went in 2014–2015—and attract students from other U.S. colleges as well. While students studied in Madrid before, “the difference is we are now a recognized educational institution in Spain,” Dimon said.

Paula Cordeiro, former longtime dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences (SOLES), is considering designing a graduate course that would bring future school principals to Spain. To do that, she said, “I need to make connections with schools and professional organizations there. It will be much easier to do that if I have a base— our Madrid Campus—to work out of.”

Seeking to Make Peace and Social Innovation

Thanks to a $25 million gift and $50 million bequest from Joan Kroc, widow of the McDonald’s founder, USD is home to the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and the Kroc School of Peace Studies. The institute won a Simon Spotlight Award in 2011 for its Women PeaceMakers program, which provides several months’ respite for community activists from war-torn countries.

Mrs. Kroc gave instructions that the institute was to not just “talk about peace, but make peace.” Perhaps no school could adequately fulfill that lofty ambition, but USD’s leaders admit that Kroc has had, in Lyons’s words, “fits and starts.” Built in 2000, it began offering master’s degrees two years later, followed by a minor for undergraduates. The Kroc School, opened in 2007, has six faculty members and 33 graduate students. But a conference it organized in November 2014 on “Defying Extremism” drew 125 international policymakers, religious leaders, and peacebuilders from 30 countries. The institute followed that up with a February 2015 regional conference on extremism that drew participants from eight Asian countries to Manila and the conflicted island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Provost Andrew Allen said Kroc has the potential to become the hub for peacebuilding studies and actions that span the university.

It has already begun strengthening ties with USD’s other schools. Patricia Marquez, Kroc’s dean since 2014, came from the School of Business Administration, where she taught entrepreneurship for social change. While still at the business school, she spearheaded creation of a joint Center for Peace and Commerce with Kroc and launched a Social Innovation Challenge that has grown beyond the campus. Last spring the Challenge awarded $75,000 to eight teams of students from universities across San Diego for such ventures as building portable toilet seats for landmine victims in Uganda and opening a school in Ghana.

Marquez is a Venezuelan-born and University of California-Berkeley–educated anthropologist—her research was on street children in Caracas—who takes an iconoclastic approach to how Kroc should pursue its mission. “I’m not interested in the same old categories. If business is going to come up with solutions to social problems, we need to bring into the conversation people very different from us in their thinking,” said Marquez. “We do focus on peace, but we’re not training philosophers of peace. We’re training people who understand philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, and all these things to solve some of the most intractable problems in the twenty-first century.”

Her successor at the joint center, economics professor Stephen Conroy, said it occupies “a rare space that folks on either side quite frankly might be somewhat uncomfortable with. But for me, being a force for good and trying to improve standards of living is what business should be all about.” USD is also an Ashoka Foundation Changemaker Campus, part of a network of 30 universities seeking to incubate innovative approaches to solving global challenges. 

Priming the Pump for Study Abroad

Half the undergraduates who study abroad do so for a full semester. Students receive $170,000 in need-based aid and get a 30 percent tuition discount on credits earned in short-term programs. As many as 100 faculty teach short-term courses overseas during January intersession and summer terms.

“We have centralized support from the international center. Graduate schools do their own programming as well,” said Dimon. “We offer a variety of study abroad programs, research missions, and service-learning activities, packaging them in different ways for students’ different needs.”

The study abroad staff is lean—Director Kira Espiritu and Associate Director Jessica Calhoun work with four advisers and an operations manager, handling all logistical arrangements and student service support—which means schools and faculty must shoulder some marketing and administrative burdens. Chemistry professor James Bolender said there are fewer such burdens than when he pioneered a field study class for science majors on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in 2001. He remembers “flying by the seat of my pants” back then. Bolender has led students back to Baja ever since and worked alongside them on a humanitarian water quality project in Mbarara, Uganda.

A Taste of International Education for Sophomores

USD’s lofty study abroad participation rate has also been helped by the Second Year Experience Abroad, part of a wider effort by the student affairs office to encourage freshmen to return for their second year. Students take a global studies seminar and travel in cohorts in January of their sophomore year to Florence, Italy, or Antigua, Guatemala. Courses offered run the gamut from language and art to chemistry and statistics. More than 10 percent of freshmen—150 students—sign up each year.

“I consider this a big retention strategy,” said Carmen Vazquez, vice president for student affairs. It’s also delivered striking results for the International Center. Espiritu said 85 percent of those sophomores wind up studying abroad again.

Piper Bloom transferred from a community college, so she missed that sophomore opportunity, but “immediately decided that I wanted to have some of that experience, even though I’m a little older than everyone else.” She chose a popular summer Shakespeare course in London. “You hear from friends who went and it just inspires you to go,” said the English major, who was headed to Japan after graduation to teach English.

Building International Experiences Into Graduate Curricula

International experiences are par for the course for many of USD’s graduate and professional schools. Dimon has a direct hand in that as she remains director of the Ahlers Center for International Business as well as associate provost. Ahlers has sent 150 MBA students to 13 countries to do international practicums, consulting directly for foreign companies or tackling projects in teams alongside MBA students from the local university. Notwithstanding that most are working professionals who are pursuing MBAs part time, a majority graduate with an international experience on their résumés, Dimon said.

Ahlers has forged close ties with EGADE Graduate Business School of the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, whose retired dean, Jaime Alonso Gomez, is now a USD distinguished professor of strategy and international business. He teaches business students and executives that in additional to the proverbial three Ps—people, products, and profits—they need to treat peace and prosperity as equally important considerations for their bottom lines. “That is the true meaning of education: bringing not only material wealth, but building better communities, better neighbors, better everything,” Gomez said.

SOLES, the leadership and education graduate school, since 2008 has required every student to participate in an international experience. “We didn’t do it on a whim. We take it very seriously,” said Linda Dews, assistant dean of the School of Leadership and Education Sciences. “We’re seeing that it’s making a difference for the way students approach their professional career.”

Most students spend only brief periods abroad, but that does not tell the full picture, said Assefa Tessema, a doctoral student from Ethiopia who directs the school’s Global Center. “When people hear it’s a one-week or 10-day program, they may assume it’s superficial work. But it’s very intensive engagement for students and for faculty, who start planning a year in advance.”

An Emphasis on Service as Well as Learning

Many study abroad programs encourage students to perform service. Political science professor Mike Williams weaves that into the summer course he teaches in South Africa. “I’m a cheerleader and also an organizer,” he said, “trying to get more people to think about how we advance our social justice mission and how to do this in their classes.”

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A conversation with Williams convinced Jennifer Bradshaw to switch majors from business to international relations and to follow Williams to the village of Makuleke, where the group slept in huts, worked alongside community leaders, and mentored youth. “They were some of the most genuine, welcoming people I’ve ever met. That experience made me rethink my own life here in the U.S. I think about it every day,” said Bradshaw.

The Mulvaney Center for Community, Awareness and Social Action arranges service immersion trips to Jamaica, Guatemala, and other countries, but also guides students to assist immigrants, the homeless, and poor in San Diego’s Linda Vista section, Tijuana, and other border towns.

In a Jamaica program led by John Loggins, director of community-based learning, students learn the history of the Atlantic slave trade, tutor kids, and participate in activities from cooking classes to jam sessions in the town of Duncan near Montego Bay. “There’s all kinds of different ways they can learn,” said Loggins, an alumnus and former Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. “It’s really transformed the dynamic in that community.”

“We’re doing this international work because it’s good education,” said Chris Nayve, an assistant provost and the center’s director who has three USD degrees (BA, JD, and MBA). “It’s not just the content of the class. It’s about who are you becoming.”

Ellis Island is a little closer to Lubbock, Texas, than one might imagine. Groups of elementary school students get off the bus on the campus of Texas Tech University (TTU) and step onto ships travelling from faraway places. This immersive Ellis Island experience, where students role play as European immigrants entering the United States, is just one of the many cultural programs offered by TTU’s K–12 Global Education Outreach (GEO) initiative.

Founded in 1997, GEO currently creates opportunities for more than 20,000 local students, teachers, and community members to learn about the world. By visiting local classrooms and inviting local K–12 students to the TTU campus, GEO staff help promote awareness of other countries and cultures in a community where many young people do not have the opportunity to travel.

“GEO reaches a substantial number of students who normally would not get any kind of international exposure, because sitting in a classroom and having a teacher show you a map of the world doesn’t cut it anymore,” says Tibor Nagy, vice provost for international affairs and retired career U.S. ambassador.

Outreach—an Essential Element of Campus Internationalization

TTU sees community outreach through GEO as a central pillar of 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.”

Kelley Coleman, director of K–12 international education and outreach, says when TTU wrote its most recent strategic plan, one of its objectives was to help close the gap between the university and the local community. “K–12 GEO’s role has expanded to build capacity in that area,” she explains.

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TTU seeks to provide opportunities both to local K–12 students and to its own students to develop global competence. “Institutions must take the challenge head on to enhance the global competency of our youth. We must prepare our young adults to live and work in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. Both our K–12 program and broad internationalization efforts at the university promote global competence through education,” says Sukant Misra, associate vice provost in the Office of International Affairs.

Enhancing Local Classrooms with Multicultural Workshops

Coleman’s team tries to build an experiential, interactive, and hands-on program to really engage kids in international issues. “We want to provide innovative programs that enhance a district’s curriculum while also creating a world-class experience that can’t be easily duplicated in a teacher’s classroom” she says.

Teachers from local school districts can go online to reserve workshops at their schools or arrange to take their students to TTU. GEO programs include the Ellis Island experience, workshops on holidays in different cultures such as Chinese Lunar New Year and Mexico’s Day of the Dead, the history of Ireland’s music and dance culture, and an exploration of Kenya’s Maasai culture.

Kay Spikes Moore, coordinator of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Lubbock High School, says that the programs offered by TTU support the IB curriculum. They have arranged for two Middle Eastern ambassadors to visit the high school and have taken students to the TTU campus to see a Korean tea service.

“GEO fills a niche that is difficult to fill. IB is centered on receiving an internationally minded education and GEO aids in the process. Speakers such as the visiting ambassadors always mesh with the IB curriculum, especially with IB World Topics, a course dealing with twentieth-century issues,” she says.

“It is very easy, out here in West Texas, to forget about the rest of the world, its issues, its culture. The K–12 Global Outreach Program helps fuel dialogue,” Moore adds.

GEO works with teachers and students at all grade levels. During the school year, for example, representatives visit the campus library at Roy Roberts Elementary School every six weeks and present multicultural lessons to each grade level. Library media specialist Kelli Kemp says that the programming helps meet state standards.

“The program content is aligned with the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) that are taught at that grade level. It is a wonderful way to reinforce what the teachers are teaching in the classroom,” she says.

According to Kemp, the presenters from TTU come with maps, props, guest speakers, costumes, music, and materials to make arts and crafts. “It was absolutely awesome! The students are totally engaged and soak in all of the information on countries from all around the world,” she says.

“This is a wonderful program for our community. It teaches students to be respectful, tolerant, and interested in different people from different cultures, and to honor their traditions and customs.”

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In addition to visiting local K–12 classrooms and hosting students on campus, GEO also works with preservice teachers to develop their own cultural awareness and to implement culturally responsive teaching practices in increasingly diverse classrooms. TTU also invites local K–12 students and teachers to hear internationally themed speakers and visit international art exhibits hosted on campus.

Creating Opportunities for Ttu Students to Interact with the Community

The K–12 GEO program is part of TTU’s Office of International Affairs, which also oversees international student services, education abroad, and international research and development. According to Coleman, the program allows TTU students, especially the more than 3,000 from abroad, and faculty an opportunity to interact with the larger community. It also gives community members a chance to interact with people from different parts of the world.

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“One of the most important things has been the benefit for international students. It’s helped our international students feel more connected to the university and to our community,” Coleman says.

Priyanka Kumari is a graduate student in computer science from India. As president of the India Student Association (ISA), she has participated in several presentations on Indian festivals such as Holi and Diwali, and demonstrated henna tattoos. “Sharing Indian culture is something that the ISA as a team... values a lot. Our K–12 sessions have been very interactive, and the kids have been very responsive,” she says.

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In addition, TTU faculty have been able to integrate community outreach into their classes. German Professor Marlene Selker and her students host an annual Weihnachten celebration to introduce around 500 local K–12 students to German Christmas traditions.

“The event allows our students and faculty to present themselves and their work to the local community. [My students] love to share their passion for German language and culture. We always have volunteers to lead groups in singing German songs, teach basic phrases, get kids involved in a bilingual puppet play, or introduce them to artifacts, arts and crafts, and cultural differences. Teaching increases their own understanding of the subject matter,” Selker says.

Nagy reiterates that community outreach is central to TTU’s larger internationalization efforts: “We really see global engagement and internationalization as having moved from the margins of the university’s priorities to the very core. The GEO unit is extremely significant because there are few international outlets in Lubbock. It has engaged many more areas of the campus in interacting with the larger community.”

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Texas Tech University

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At first glance, Greenville, situated in eastern North Carolina, might seem to be an unlikely international education hub. The town of around 90,000 is home to East Carolina University (ECU), a public research institution serving students from the surrounding rural areas. Since the 1950s ECU has been a leader in distance education in North Carolina, and it was one of the first universities in the United States to offer an online degree. With a mission to maximize access through innovative learning strategies, ECU has capitalized on this leadership in online learning to bring global opportunities to its campus.

Technology Boosts Internationalization

With few international students on campus and low study abroad participation rates, ECU views technology as a medium to boost internationalization. The Global Academic Initiatives (GAI) program was started as a way to promote international collaborative learning through technology. “Our charge is to use innovative technology-based learning strategies to provide ECU students with international education experiences,” says Jami Leibowitz, GAI interim director. GAI coordinates the Global Understanding (GU) program, which virtually connects ECU students and faculty with partners around the world. The program has been running for more than a decade, starting with a two-week pilot course in 2003. Elmer Poe, professor emeritus and technology specialist, cofounded the program with former ECU psychology professor Rosina Chia, after discussing the lack of opportunities for cultural exchange available to ECU students.

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“One day we were commiserating about how we could provide experiences to more students that would really give them an opportunity to interact with students from other cultures. We decided that we would try using some form of electronic communication,” Poe says.

They used their assessments of the pilot program as the basis of what would later become the Global Understanding courses. “We took the lessons that we learned and began to work with our anthropology and political science departments to create a course that would introduce students to cultures,” Poe adds.

The program has grown significantly since its inception. Today ECU boasts more than 60 partners in approximately 30 countries. Each year the program connects approximately 1,400 ECU students with 2,700 partner students—a total of 21,000 students since the program started.

The program was built on simple video technology that engages partners from all over the world. “We use technology that allows the partner with the lowest connectivity to interact with the partner with the highest connectivity,” Poe explains.

Broad Topics Lead to Cultural Conversations

GU courses are multidisciplinary with a broad focus so that classes of different subjects can connect. Each GU class works with three international partners for approximately four weeks each. The partners switch off to work with all of the other partners over the duration of the course. Students discuss topics such as college life, family, cultural traditions, and religion. The class then concludes with an online collaborative project.

Sixty percent of class time is spent online with partners, and the remaining time is for the professor to facilitate disciplinary-based discussion. For example, a business class learning about multigenerational households in another country may discuss marketing strategies for that culture.

Anthropologist Blakely Brooks has taught in the program with partners in more than 10 countries. His students are generally nervous at the beginning but often become close with their partners: “I have had several students come up to me on campus and say ‘Dr. Brooks I am still talking with my global understanding partner in Nigeria!’”

Leibowitz says that students often switch to a more internationally focused major and have incorporated international perspectives into their theses after taking GU courses. ECU also sees the Global Understanding program as a stepping stone for future study abroad.

Enhancing Upper-Division Classes

ECU uses the same technology to provide enhancements to upper-division courses. Brooks, for instance, has used the technology in his anthropology courses. In a course on peoples of Central and South America, ECU students discussed topics such as favelas, racism in Latin America, and the 2016 Olympic games with Brazilian and Peruvian peers. “Utilizing [technology] gave students the opportunities to discuss complex cultural topics,” Blakely says.

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Professor Patricia Clark runs a class for youth theater majors in which she links to partners in Egypt and Japan. They collect cultural stories from their partners and turn them into dramatic scripts. “We perform at various schools and community centers to try to promote an interest in different cultures,” she says.

Clark has worked closely with counterparts at University of Shimane in Japan, which created an opportunity to take three students with her to Japan to meet their partners. “They produced a show that was a collection of worldwide tales” Clark explains.

Providing High-Level Logistical Support

One of the pillars of the GU program is providing a high level of technical and logistical support to both ECU faculty and partners.

Leibowitz says one of her biggest challenges is coordinating the master schedule. For the 2015–2016 academic year, ECU offered 37 sections of the Global Understanding courses. “We have to take into consideration time zones, different academic calendars, different holidays, and different class days,” Leibowitz says.

ECU has also created a community among its partners by instituting an umbrella organization, Global Partners in Education (GPE). Every year, a partner institution hosts an annual conference, which involves networking, presentations on best practices, opportunities to learn about the host institution and country, a review of the previous year, and setting future goals.

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“The conference is an opportunity for partners to meet, learn about each other, and open conversations of activities that they can do with each other,” Leibowitz says.

For many partners, participating in Global Understanding creates international experiences for students who are unable to travel. According to Cajetan Nnaocha, a Nigerian professor teaching at the University of The Gambia, Global Understanding was the first time his students were able to engage in cultural exchanges. “Most of them were for the first time interacting with white students,” he says, adding that another significant benefit of the program was learning IT skills.

Other partners see it as a significant part of their own “internationalization at home.” “Offering GU has given us a great opportunity to bring direct intercultural experiences to more students,” says Kathrin Ullrich, head of international programs at Universidad Regiomontana in Monterrey, Mexico.

Changing What It Means to Be International

According to Leibowitz, the impact of the GU program has been felt across campus: “We’re changing the attitude on campus about what it means to be internationalized, and that you don’t have to necessarily offer a summer study abroad trip for your class to be international.”

GAI is working to extend the initiative beyond the classroom to reach even more students. This fall ECU will pilot a student organization, WorldWise, with four partners. Each month, students will link with an international partner to engage in a cocurricular collaborative activity on a common theme.

Provost Ron Mitchelson says that Global Understanding has been an effective way to promote comprehensive internationalization. “It really has provided a marquee program that elevates interest and administrative awareness across the campus. This program is sort of priming the pump and getting folks energized about opportunities,” he explains.

Vice President of Academic Success Chris Locklear says ECU is also currently looking at ways to capitalize upon the existing GU partnerships for recruitment purposes: “We want to increase our international presence on campus. We have around 529 international students on campus right now. We hope to grow that to 1,500 over a five-year period.”

Part of ECU’s ability to expand its partnerships includes closer future collaboration between Global Academic Initiatives and the Office of International Affairs, which manages international student services and study abroad, under a global affairs umbrella.

GAI recently launched its first course with a travel component. Working with a language teacher at University of Shimane, an ECU faculty member led an ethnic studies course focused on culture in Vietnam and Japan that culminated with ECU students meeting their Japanese peers for a service-learning trip to Vietnam.

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Anthropology major Sara Heath was one of 13 participants to travel to Vietnam: “As a nontraditional student, I have worked full time as a certified nursing assistant. Because I have paid for my own education, it was never possible for me to take off for a summer program or a semester-long study abroad. This two-week experience was perfect for my situation.”

Leibowitz hopes that in the future ECU is able to offer more courses that integrate the virtual component with study abroad: “I think that it will just be a natural that some of these courses have a mobility component. You can connect and continue those relationships you develop when you’re abroad and establish some relationships before you go to enhance the on-the-ground activity. We’re actually really excited about that, especially in terms of comprehensive internationalization.”

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East Carolina University

Read more about East Carolina University

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

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

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

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

Leveraging Accreditation to Push Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrating Global Competence with a Certificate of International Studies

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

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

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

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

Creating a Study Abroad Pipeline Through Early Global Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

Exploration Through Inspiration in the Honors Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting Sportsmanship Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

Fostering Cultural Connections with Cuba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Excellence Abroad Through Travel Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Diversity as a Recruitment Tool

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

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

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

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

As Boston’s only public research institution, University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) sets itself apart in a number of ways, including the composition of its student body. The diversity of UMass Boston, with minority students making up 48 percent of its more than 17,000-student population, means that the global truly starts at home.

Chancellor J. Keith Motley says the university’s current mission goes far beyond its original mandate from 1974: “While we are an institution that began as one that was born to serve the citizens of Boston, we realized that in doing that we also serve the citizens of the world because this campus has transformed into one with over 90 different languages spoken on campus and 150 different countries represented.”

Designated as an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institution (AANAPISI), UMass Boston is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a minority-serving institution. Many students are first-generation college students who come from immigrant backgrounds.

Senior anthropology major Michelle Chouinard says she has benefitted from opportunities to travel abroad as well as the global composition of the student population: “Our student population is so diverse. As someone who grew up in suburbia, it’s altered the way that I look at my own backyard.”

Embracing the Urban Context

Chancellor Motley and Provost Winston E. Langley view UMass Boston’s profile as an urban public research institution as central to its global vision. The university’s mission statement, which was revised in 2010 as part of its strategic plan, explicitly links the urban and the global: “The University of Massachusetts Boston is a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement.”

According to Langley, the goal is to make UMass Boston the most cosmopolitan public urban research university in the United States. “By cosmopolitan, we mean that our students upon graduating should be able to live, thrive, and establish their social wellbeing any place on earth and do so with cultural ease. If our students are going to be citizens, not just occupants, of that society, they must be actively engaged and must be capable of crossing cultural cleavages and borders with facility,” he says.

A Systems Approach to Internationalization

One of the first things Langley did when he became provost in 2009, after more than two decades serving UMass Boston in a variety of other academic and administrative positions, was to establish the Office of Global Programs. Global Programs currently manages all internationalization efforts at UMass Boston under the leadership of Schuyler S. Korban, who came on board in 2013.

The Office of Global Programs has become the campus’s internationalization hub under Korban’s leadership as vice provost. Global Programs oversees a wide portfolio, including international student and scholar services, education abroad, exchange partnerships, an international visiting scholar academy, international internships, and a Confucius Institute, among others.

Robyn Hannigan, dean of the School for the Environment, has seen a huge change in terms of internationalization at UMass Boston in the seven years she’s been at the institution: “Since Schuyler has come on board, there has been a culture shift where what the faculty are doing (with international opportunities) is not only appreciated, but it’s expected and it’s merited. Our provost and our chancellor are fully aware when we’ve travelled abroad.”

Korban says he draws on his academic background as a molecular biologist in his approach to internationalization. “We think in terms of systems, so I look at internationalization as a system. I’m interested in expanding our network and along with the expansion of that network, identifying nodes of strength in terms of our partnerships overseas,” he explains.

One example of a “node of strength” is the Center for Governance and Sustainability (CGS). Under the leadership of Robyn Hannigan and Maria Ivanova, codirector of CGS, UMass Boston has received an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant from the National Science Foundation for its transdisciplinary program, Coasts and Communities. This grant, focusing on international research in the Horn of Africa, has helped shape internal campus development by promoting collaborations among the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies, the College of Science and Mathematics, the School for the Environment, the College of Management, and the College of Liberal Arts.

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Ivanova approached Korban about offering a short course in Ethiopia. “I said, ‘Think about it in the bigger context. Let’s think about it as an opportunity to create something sustainable,’” Korban says.

He gave Ivanova funding to establish a regional environmental diplomacy institute that brought together representatives of the Ethiopian ministries of foreign affairs and environment with parliamentarians, academics, and nongovernmental organizations. “We shared our research findings about how countries are implementing their obligations under international environmental conventions,” Ivanova says.

Seed Funding to Increase International Engagement

One of Korban’s first initiatives as vice provost of global programs was to launch a competitive seed grant program that supports internationalization of teaching, research, and outreach. In total, the Office of Global Programs has dedicated $150,000 to the initiative.

“The idea is to support faculty who are interested in internationalizing education, research, and service. As a result, our faculty-led programs have increased. Then, in turn, they develop these new courses that end up impacting our study abroad programs,” Korban says.

Last year, Felicia L. Wilczenski, associate dean of the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, received a $5,000 seed grant to bring in representatives from John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland for an international conference, Building Inclusive Communities, in December 2015. She also used the funding to help take a group of UMass students to Poland for a course and study tour titled Focus on Inclusive Policy, Practice, and Educational Reforms in Poland.

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“The funds helped me to enact parts of the MOU that UMass Boston previously executed with the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) in Poland. These two activities helped to deepen the partnership between our two institutions. We also have a joint research collaboration in the planning stages,” Wilczenski says.

Since 2014 the Office of Global Programs has also committed $50,000 annually to incentivize faculty to internationalize their curricula for both undergraduate and graduate programs. Faculty and teaching staff can receive up to $1,500 for curricular enhancements, the creation of online modules, or travel abroad.

Student Mobility Through Exchange and Short-Term Programs

The Office of Global Programs has focused on developing short-term and exchange programs, largely due to the makeup of the student body. “With the demographics that we have, we have been focusing on short term as opposed to semester or year-long programs,” Korban says.

Over the last five years, the number of UMass Boston students studying abroad has increased from 75 students in 2009–10 to 466 in 2014–15, according to Ksenija Borojevic, assistant director for study abroad.

The Office of Global Programs has also focused on the development of reciprocal exchange agreements. UMass Boston currently offers its students more than 35 exchange options, which also help boost the number of international students on campus. In 2014–2015, 78 exchange students enrolled at UMass Boston.

Natalia Pisklak, a senior biology major, spent last summer at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. She worked one-on-one with a professor to study neurophysiology.

“It made me gain confidence in talking with professors about science. I was always scared of talking about a field that they know so much about, but now I am so much more comfortable,” she says.

Lurlene Van Buren, coordinator of student exchange, says that undergraduate exchange programs also serve as a recruiting tool to attract international students to UMass Boston graduate programs. Marco Bellin, an Italian MBA student, was such an exchange student in 2009–2010.

“I felt from my exchange program here seven years ago that this was a place I could call home. I saw UMass Boston as a good value for money option where I could get a top notch MBA at the fraction of a cost of other institutions,” Bellin says.

UMass Boston also offers 25 faculty-led programs, which have helped contribute to significant increases in students studying abroad. The number of students participating in these programs jumped from 132 in 2011–12 to 219 in 2014–15.

The Honors College offers one such program, a year-long seminar called International Epidemics. In between the two semesters, students participate in a 12-day field experience over winter break to South Africa led by Rajini Srikanth, dean of the Honors College, and Louise Penner, associate professor in English. Last year, Srikanth and Penner also took students to India for the first time.

Penner says that the discussion in the classroom is much richer the second semester after students have returned from their field experience. “The spring semester is very gratifying in some ways, because students make complex associations and analyses, and conversations become very far ranging. That’s why we are both always surprised at the kind of impact that 12 days has on them,” she says.

An Entrepreneurial College Working Across the University

Most of UMass Boston’s faculty-led programs are run through the College of Advancing and Professional Studies (CAPS), which collaborates with all academic departments and the Office of Global Programs. In addition to administering faculty-led programs, CAPS oversees an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, online learning, and a number of certificate and degree programs.

Dean Philip DiSalvio describes CAPS as “the entrepreneurial arm of the university.” However, he stresses that the aim of CAPS, as a self-sustaining unit, is not to generate profit but to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus. DiSalvio’s team works hard to make study abroad affordable to as many students as possible, with programs generally operating at cost.

CAPS often builds on relationships that professors bring with them to UMass Boston. One recent program was Conflict Transformation Across Borders in Quito, Ecuador.

Building on his affiliation as a Fulbright fellow to the Department of International Studies and Communication at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) Ecuador, Assistant Professor Jeff Pugh wanted to continue running study abroad programs in Ecuador when he joined UMass Boston. During the three-week summer course, students learn about conflict resolution, and acquire skills such as negotiation and proposal writing. They also visit indigenous communities along the border between Ecuador and Colombia. “We talked about how the refugee issue has been affecting their identity as a border community where a lot of people have family on both sides of the border,” says Pugh.

Abdul Aziz, a master’s student in conflict resolution and Fulbright scholar, was one of 14 participants in the program. He was able to find parallels to his own experiences in his native Indonesia. “I didn’t expect to be able to relate my own stories with those of the refugees that I met. It feels very similar with what happens at home in Indonesia with all the identitybased conflict,” he says.

International Exposure for First-Year Students

Within the College of Science and Math, Dean Andrew Grosovsky has helped establish the Scotland Exchange Program in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), an urban university in Scotland. UMass Boston freshmen majoring in science and mathematics engage in the exchange as part of their participation in a freshman success community.

Since 2011 UMass Boston and GCU each send six freshmen to the other institution for a week-long exchange. At UMass Boston, each of three freshman success communities within the College of Science and Math nominate two student ambassadors to travel to Glasgow for a week during the fall semester. Other members of the freshman success communities are responsible for hosting the visiting Scottish students.

Grosovsky says that the larger goal of the exchange is to strengthen and better integrate the three freshman learning communities, which are made up of around 70 students in total. They benefit from working together to host the Scottish students, and at the same time, gain exposure to another culture.

“Sometimes people say that six students for one week doesn’t sound like a lot, but we have had more than 10 times that number who are participating. They are all interacting closely with the Scottish students and are experiencing the value of the exchange,” Grosovsky says.

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Megan Fung is a freshman biochemistry major who traveled to Glasgow as an ambassador. “There’s a lot more to the exchange than people understand. A lot of it is about networking and developing relationships not only with the Glasgow Caledonian students, but also with each other,” she says.

The School for the Environment also offers its freshmen an early international experience. In fact it is the only academic unit on campus that requires students to have an international experience before graduation. As part of the freshman seminar for environmental science, 15 freshmen traveled to the Azores islands in Portugal to learn about geology, ecology, and land-use practices.

Erika Welch, a sophomore environmental science major, said that having an international experience so early in her college career made her want to study abroad again. During summer 2016, she spent three weeks in Brazil in another program piloted through the School for the Environment.

Global Engagement Outside the Classroom

Kim Montoni, director of international education, organizes a number of programs geared toward engaging the larger campus community in global affairs. Her flagship initiative is Global Ambassadors, a leadership program that requires students to commit to working with international programming for an academic year.

Five to 10 students are selected each year to serve as global ambassadors. Throughout the year, they participate in workshops and professional development opportunities. They are also responsible for organizing activities for international students on campus, and they assist Montoni with international student orientation and with the U.S. Department of State’s International Education Week.

“Our job as global student ambassadors is not only to be a bridge, but also to create a very strong community,” says Aroma Kazmi, a psychology major from India.

The students traveled with Montoni to New York City, where they visited the United Nations (UN) headquarters. Last year, global ambassadors also attended the NAFSA 2015 Annual Conference & Expo in Boston.

Montoni collaborates with other offices on campus, offering predeparture orientations and health and safety support for non-credit-bearing servicelearning trips offered through the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement. She also works closely with the Division of Student Affairs, whose activities often dovetail with those of the global ambassadors.

Growth Through Strategic Recruitment

The last five years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of international students on the UMass Boston campus, from 675 in 2009–10 to nearly 2,500 in 2015–16, currently making up approximately 12 percent of the entire student body. The boost in international student enrollment has largely been a combination of an active recruitment strategy abroad and pathway programs such as the Navitas at UMass Boston Undergraduate Pathway Program. UMass Boston has focused on the development of pathway programs that allow students to work on language skills prior to pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

According to Michael Todorsky, manager of international partnerships, UMass Boston’s first pathway program began 14 years ago with four students from one program with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Since then, it has expanded to Vietnam and South Korea. UMass Boston has also established a residential ESL program at the Massachusetts International Academy in Marlborough that currently serves around 300 students.

Lisa Johnson, vice chancellor for enrollment management, would like to increase the share of international students from its current 12 percent. However, the challenge lies in continued growth in domestic enrollment.

The freshman class of fall 2015 was the largest in the history of UMass Boston, with nearly 3,400 new students—and even more growth is projected in upcoming years. To accommodate the expected growth, the campus has been under construction with two new buildings completed in 2015 and 2016, with an investment of more than $700 million. In 2018 the university will open its first residence hall to provide housing for 1,000 students.

Johnson is excited about the prospect of on-campus housing to boost international student enrollment: “We just opened these two academic buildings. We’re building another. The residence halls are going to be beautiful. When all of these dirt piles are gone, you can get back to driving around this peninsula. Who would not want to come here from another country?”
 

The College of William & Mary (W&M) in Williamsburg, Virginia, carries on an educational tradition that traces back more than three centuries. As the second-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, William & Mary was founded by King William III and Queen Mary II of England. As current President Taylor Reveley puts it, “We were born global in 1693.”

William & Mary sponsored its first study abroad programs in 1924, and today the university boasts the highest percentage of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs among all public universities in the United States. As of 2016, more than 50 percent of William & Mary undergraduates study abroad before graduation;1 according to Reveley, W&M aims to increase that number to 60 percent by 2018.

Drawing on its historical commitment to innovative teaching and learning, today William & Mary has emerged as a leader in international education with opportunities such as undergraduate research on crucial global problems and a strong ethos of public service. For example, W&M is currently one of the top producers of Peace Corps volunteers among institutions of its size.

“The students who come here want to come to a university that not only has study abroad opportunities, but that also gives them the tools to involve themselves in tackling problems in the developing world or global issues ranging from climate change to health,“ says Stephen Hanson, vice provost for international affairs.

Creating a University-Wide Internationalization Hub

At the forefront of all things international at William & Mary is the Reves Center for International Studies, established in 1989 with a mission “to support and promote the internationalization of learning, teaching, research and community involvement at William & Mary.”

The Reves Center provides support for international initiatives at W&M’s five academic schools—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Raymond A. Mason School of Business, the School of Education, the School of Law, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). In addition to managing study abroad, offering support for international students and scholars, and providing travel safety advice, the Reves Center promotes and supports international research and organizes on-campus events for the wider campus—and Williamsburg—community.

Since Hanson became director in 2011, he has broken down institutional barriers and worked with offices and academic units across the campus. “We just made it really clear that this is a universitywide internationalization hub,” he says.

Global Engagement Through Outreach and Assessment

The Reves Center is divided into three offices: Global Education; International Students, Scholars, and Programs; and Global Engagement. During his tenure at the Reves Center, Hanson has very intentionally built out the global engagement team, which works with internationalization more generally.

Kate Hoving, public relations manager, oversees the Reves Center’s outreach efforts. She says her job is important to building an internationally minded community. “It’s important to nurture a sense of connection with students and faculty who have come through Reves—whether through study abroad or as international students, scholars, and families,” she says.

Another recent addition to the global engagement team is Nick Vasquez, international travel and security manager. Vasquez, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department, assesses risk for students, faculty, and staff who go abroad on university-sponsored travel. Vasquez, who is a member of the university’s Emergency Management Team, says that being aware of the potential risks associated with international travel is an important aspect of running a safe program. In that capacity, Reves serves as a clearinghouse for the entire campus.

Growing Education Abroad with University-Wide Support

The first stop for the more than 800 W&M students who go abroad each year is the Global Education Office, overseen by director Sylvia Mitterndorfer. In addition to the resources available through financial aid, W&M provides more than $400,000 a year in education abroad scholarships. Students can choose from among W&M’s 45 faculty-led programs, 17 semester-long exchange programs, or options through third-party providers.

One of the newest faculty-led programs is an interdisciplinary course, affectionately dubbed “Rock Music Oman,” developed by geologist Chuck Bailey and ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen. Students spent two weeks in January 2016 exploring the natural landscape and geological formations of the Omani desert and coastal regions and the vibrant arts scene in the capital of Muscat.

William & Mary also strives to create programs, many with a research component, that make study abroad available to all majors. Senior Alpha Mansaray, a double major in public health and kinesiology, participated in a summer program in Antigua.

“For science majors, it’s hard to fit study abroad into your curriculum. When I heard about this program, I got so excited because I didn’t think I could study abroad. As part of the trip, we also visited hospitals and learned about a different medical system,” Mansaray says.

Comprehensive Services for International Students, Scholars, and Their Families

In addition to sending 800 undergraduates abroad each year, William & Mary also hosts nearly the same number of international students and scholars. Stephen Sechrist is the resident expert on immigration regulation as the director of the International Students, Scholars, and Programs Office (ISSP). According to Sechrist, ISSP operates in three core areas: immigration and visa services; programming, advocacy, and outreach; and English language programs.

Sechrist and his staff try to build relationships with students and their families before they even set foot on campus. Recently, they have partnered with the Dean of Students Office to offer admitted students days abroad, starting in Beijing and expanding to Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. “For a lot of our international students abroad, it’s just not feasible to fly over for a one day event,” Sechrist says.

W&M will be launching its first intensive English program this summer. Students will start online in their home countries and then do a residential week at W&M prior to the regular international student orientation.

Staff also find other ways to help new international students connect to the W&M community before they arrive on campus. Through the virtual conversation partner program, which was designed by W&M School of Education alumna Jingzhu Zhang to help international students feel connected to campus and practice their English, April Yuezhong Zheng, a senior history major from China, was paired with a U.S. student. “I started talking with my partner Connor over Skype. We started in late May and then we basically did it at least two to three times a month until I arrived. He even picked me up at the airport,” she says.

In addition to serving international students, ISSP also tries to provide support to the families of its approximately 100 international scholars.

Ettore Vitali is a postdoc from Italy who studies theoretical environmental physics. His wife, Gabriella Lettini, accompanied him to Williamsburg. She has been able to take English classes as well as find ways to get involved in the community through volunteering at a local animal shelter. “It is very helpful for me to improve my English and also to meet other people,” she says.

“We have a very thriving international family network to support the families of our international students, scholars, and faculty,” Sechrist adds.

At the graduate level, the law and business schools have more active recruitment strategies for their LLM and MBA programs. Amanda Barth, director of MBA admissions for the Mason School of Business, says that approximately 40 percent of the 110 students in each MBA cohort are international.

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Deep Connections Abroad with International Partners

Since 2011 W&M has offered a unique joint degree program with the University of St Andrews in Scotland that grew out of a 25-year study abroad and exchange relationship. The program currently has four tracks: economics, English, history, and international relations; new tracks in classics and film studies have also just been approved.

According to Associate Professor and Program Director Colleen Kennedy, the program recruits approximately five students in each major at each school, for a total of 40 students per cohort, the first of which graduated in 2015. In total, students complete two years at each institution.

History major Jui Kothare says one of the reasons she chose the program was the history of the two institutions. She began her freshman year at St Andrews before moving to W&M her sophomore year. “The second year is really tough just because you have to be a freshman again and make the same connections all over again,” she explains.

To help students make the transition, Kennedy created a peer advising program. “Our job is basically to help the first and second years come over here, and integrate into the community,” says economics major Cooper Nelson.

Nelson says the program’s uniqueness helped him secure a position at a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., after he graduates: “The program provides such a great talking point. It’s provided an easy way to connect with employers. They have to question: ‘why did you go to two different schools at the exact same time?’”

Bringing International Partnerships to Campus

Established in 2011, the William & Mary Confucius Institute (WMCI) is a joint program with Beijing Normal University in China, sponsored by Hanban, a nonprofit organization under the Chinese Ministry of Education. “Our mission here is to promote Chinese language learning and Chinese language culture, on campus and also in the neighboring community,” says Lei Ma, Chinese director.

Ma says the institute has collaborated with various departments, including the Chinese Studies department, to organize events and lectures. It also assists the Reves Center in predeparture orientations for study abroad to China and helps host a summer program for 40 undergraduate students from Beijing Normal University.

“We also do quite a bit of community outreach here. For example, we collaborate with local K–12 schools,” adds Ying Liu, WMCI assistant director.

Another flagship program overseen by the Reves Center is the William & Mary Cross-Cultural Collaboration with Keio University in Japan. Each summer, W&M hosts 40 Japanese students for a three-week program that allows them to study U.S. culture and society alongside William & Mary students.

William & Mary also participates in the Presidential Precinct, a nonprofit organization operated in collaboration with the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, James Monroe’s Highland, and William Short’s Morven. The consortium hosts 25 young African fellows through the Mandela Washington Fellowship, the flagship program of President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative, for a six-week program every summer. 

A Longstanding Commitment to Undergraduate Research

William & Mary has been described by Dan Cristol, a biology professor, as having “the heart of a liberal arts college with the brains of a research university.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the university’s commitment to undergraduate research opportunities.

“What makes undergraduate education here great is the way the faculty teach. A lot of them increasingly teach through research. I publish articles with my students,” says Sue Peterson, government professor and director of the international relations program.

In fact, approximately 70 percent of William & Mary undergraduates participate in mentored research with a faculty member or take a course in which research is a primary component.

Senior Hispanic studies major Stephanie Heredia participated in a five-week summer study abroad program to Cádiz, Spain, where she researched Spanish pop culture as part of her capstone project: “At the end of the project, we had to do a 15-page paper and a presentation all in Spanish. This experience really helped me get acquainted with the culture and field research practices.”

W&M offers incentives for faculty to collaborate with students on research projects. Through its faculty fellows program, Reves offers grants of $5,000–$10,000 for “projects that involve students either through student-faculty collaborations on an international research project, or that involve research, teaching, and learning through community-based engagement.”

In 2012 Francis Tanglao-Aguas, professor of dance and theater, received a $10,000 grant to travel to Bali, Indonesia, with a fellow faculty member and five students. As a result of the trip, he produced the Sitayana (Sita’s Journey), an original dance theater epic inspired by the story of the wife of a Hindu poet. The five students who traveled with him assisted with training the other students who took part in the production.

“The fellowship led to the creation of an original piece. It was a major component of my body of work with students. I took five students, but when you count the more than 150 students who were part of that project afterwards and the 1,000 students who saw the show, it was a worthy investment,” Tanglao-Aguas says.

A Campus Hub for Student-Faculty Collaboration on Policy-Relevant Research

A hub for interdisciplinary undergraduate research on campus is the Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations (ITPIR), headed by Director Michael Tierney.

ITPIR’s mission is “to produce innovative and policyrelevant research; to provide students with research skills and experiences; and to make a difference in the world.” There are currently more than 20 faculty and 250 undergraduates involved with ITPIR in various ways.

ITPIR has projects on topics ranging from the impact of cell phone technology on women’s empowerment and development in Africa to using computer algorithms to forecast political violence. Other programs include an undergraduate think tank in international peace and security and a summer program in Bosnia during which W&M students run an English immersion camp for kids.

AidData is a W&M research and innovation lab affiliated with ITPIR that focuses on international development finance. According to Carey Glenn, junior program manager, around 120 student researchers work on aid tracking programs. AidData sends 15–20 of these student researchers abroad for 10 weeks through its summer fellows program.

Breanna Cattelino, a senior public policy major, spent last summer in Uganda to train local organizations in global information systems (GIS). “It was a lot of actual on-the-ground work,” she says.

Curriculum Reform to Provide International Experiences for Everyone

According to Provost Michael Halleran, William & Mary’s goals in the next several years are to “become even more international, interdisciplinary, and engaged with student research in the coming years.” A big step toward achieving these aims is the implementation of a new undergraduate general education curriculum in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences this year.

The new curriculum replaces the previous “breadth requirements” with an integrated series of courses. Freshmen take courses that introduce them to “big ideas,” followed by courses rooted in natural science, social science, and humanities that nevertheless take an interdisciplinary approach their sophomore year. Their junior year, students take “COLL 300,” which requires a global or cross-cultural experience. Students then complete a capstone project during their final year.

“One of the things that we are trying to do in the new curriculum is put a greater emphasis on things international and global and be sure that everybody one way or another gets involved,” says President Reveley.

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Hanson says COLL 300 is the “internationalization pillar” of the new curriculum. Most students will meet the COLL 300 requirement through study abroad. Students can also meet the cross-cultural requirement through study away in the United States or through specific on-campus courses with a global focus.

Halleran adds that COLL 300 was designed from a perspective of “opportunities more than requirements. I’m very pleased with how the faculty addressed a broader international piece in the curriculum,” he says.

Faculty members are equally as pleased with the new curriculum. “All the initiatives with COLL 300 are really to institutionalize what a lot of us have already been doing,” says ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen.
 

Students at William Rainey Harper College (Harper), a community college in Palatine, Illinois, gain new perspectives on themselves and their place in the world through the lens of a single region. Built on faculty professional development, curriculum innovation, and student mobility, the Global Region of Focus (GRF) initiative offers a three-year cycle of interdisciplinary programs that underpin Harper’s broader internationalization efforts. The first Global Region of Focus, launched in 2014, was East Africa, followed by Latin America in 2017. 

Streamlining Internationalization

In 2010, English professor Richard Johnson was appointed coordinator of Harper’s international studies and programs. He brought in external international education experts to analyze Harper’s existing international programs, which led to the college’s first internationalization plan. “We really needed to think about how we were going to streamline our approach to internationalization,” Johnson says. “Although we did a lot of good work, international [activities] had been pretty haphazard up until that point.” 

The bedrock of Harper’s new internationalization plan is the GRF initiative. Each of the 3 years of the cycle has a different programmatic scope. In the first year, faculty can apply to participate in a professional development seminar with travel to the region of focus, after which they infuse international perspectives into their teaching. In the second year, Harper hosts an international scholar from the region, and, in the third year, students go abroad through faculty-led programs to countries in the region. 

The initiative is funded with support from Provost Judy Marwick’s office. Faculty members are also asked to commit their annual professional development funds toward their participation in the field seminars. In the second and third years of the GRF cycle, the budget is dedicated to supporting the visiting scholar and providing study abroad scholarships for students. 

Developing Faculty Internationalization

According to Johnson, faculty development is at the heart of the GRF initiative. Geography professor Mukila Maitha, who originally comes from Kenya, designed the first international field seminar, which was held in spring 2014. He created the curriculum for a 15-hour graduate-equivalent course for an interdisciplinary cohort involving nine faculty from seven different departments. The group met on campus once a week for 2 months and then spent 2 weeks traveling to Uganda and Rwanda in May and June 2014. 

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Maitha tailored the trip itinerary to appeal to the diverse interests of faculty from multiple disciplines. For example, they visited a museum focused on anthropology and met with urban planners in Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Other excursions included a visit to coffee and tea plantations and to a national park. 

“It was interesting having faculty coming from different fields and backgrounds together because people will have totally different takes on the experience,” Maitha says. 

The group visited universities in Kigali and Butare in Rwanda. Participants also spent a day at Makerere University in Uganda meeting with faculty counterparts who shared similar research interests. 

English professor Judi Nitsch, for example, was paired with Susan Kiguli, a Ugandan poet and associate professor of literature at Makerere. Nitsch says she would not have encountered Kiguli’s work if not for the seminar, and it inspired her to work with the Harper library to order fictional literature written by other Ugandan women. 

Similarly, the 2017 Global Region of Focus on Latin America included significant faculty development efforts. Historian David Richmond designed the second faculty seminar in spring 2017. For two weeks in May and June, Richmond led the faculty group to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, visiting archaeological sites, agricultural plantations, a solar farm, national parks, and other locations of historical and cultural significance.

Infusing International Perspectives Across Campus

The goal of the faculty field seminars is for participants to share their international experiences with students and colleagues on the home campus. Since its inception in 2014, the GRF has produced 75 programs and impacted more than 3,200 community college students. Through curriculum infusion projects, presentations, and other events, more than 70 faculty—and 20 percent of full-time professors—have participated in the GRF. 

After participating in the field seminar, faculty are expected to “infuse” the courses they teach with new content stemming from the focus region. “At the end of the process, each faculty member has to come up with [a plan for] what kind of curriculum project they are going to create out of their field experience,” Maitha says.  

“We think it’s important that [our students] be introduced to as much of the world as possible through the lens of their classroom experience,” says President Kenneth Ender.

Nitsch, for instance, revamped a course in non-Western literature to focus on East Africa based on the relationship she developed with her counterpart at Makerere University. “I was able to teach Susan’s work and that of a couple of other contemporary writers, as well as use an anthology of folk writing and nonfiction writing from women across several centuries,” she says. 

According to Richmond, curriculum infusion projects that came out of the field seminar in Central America included the development of a Spanish-English medical component for a radiology class, a unit on liberation theology for a philosophy class, and a unit on Mayan household archaeology. 

Nitsch says that the international field seminars allow faculty who do not necessarily have an international background to gain the necessary expertise. “The seminar gives faculty enough grounding so that they feel like they can present that material. I think it builds confidence,” she says.

Faculty are also expected to do further outreach once they are back on campus and offer presentations for colleagues through Harper’s Academy for Teaching Excellence. “When faculty come back, they are encouraged to act as ambassadors within their department to help other faculty infuse international materials,” Maitha says. 

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Nitsch has organized an annual research symposium that allows students to showcase their work from infused classes. In addition, Harper hosted Jimrex Byamugisha, a lecturer in statistics and economics at Makerere University, as a visiting Fulbright scholar in fall 2015, as part of a program on Africa. During Byamugisha’s semester-long residence at Harper, he gave 22 campus lectures, reaching more than 600 students. 

Encouraging Student Mobility

Byamugisha, who had initially worked with Maitha during the faculty visit to Makerere, also served as a valuable contact in the development of a faculty-led program to Uganda in 2017. Other faculty-led programs included an honors course with an embedded trip to Zimbabwe and a composition course that included a 10-day service-learning trip to Nicaragua. 

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Michele Mabry, a Harper College staff member who completed her associate’s degree in May 2018, traveled with Harper faculty to both Uganda and Nicaragua. “Deciding to participate in the study abroad programs was a big commitment and not an easy task for me, in many ways, but it was so important to me educationally, personally, and professionally,” she says. 

Nora Myer was another participant on the Nicaragua trip, which was the culmination of a semester-long course that encouraged students to reflect on the impact—positive or negative—that service learning might have on the communities with which they interacted. “Our class became exceedingly aware of the importance of reciprocity within service and the significance of knowledge production that starts from the ground up,” she says. 

Drawing on the critical mass of support for campus internationalization that the initiative has generated, Harper is already planning for its next Global Region of Focus, which will be Southeast Asia. Associate Provost Brian Knetl says the overarching goal of the initiative is to create a culture of internationalization that extends beyond the typical twoyear experience for community college students. 

“We are putting all of our efforts and resources into the GRF. It extends everywhere, from the faculty to the curriculum to the students to the programming,” he says. “What we hope happens over those 3 years is that the campus becomes infused with a flavor of that region.”

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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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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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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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