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?”
 

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

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

Developing a Global Network

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

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

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

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

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

Creating a Positive Experience for International Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing Global Professionals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Localizing a Global Curriculum

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

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

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

Boosting Student Mobility

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

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

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

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

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

Creating Alternative Opportunities to Travel the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internationalizing the Disciplines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paving the Way to the Future

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

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.
 

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

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

Balancing Individual Initiative and Centralized Coordination

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

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

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

Using Data Analysis to Identify Strategic Partners

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

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

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

Planting the Seeds for Future Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Model for Engagement Around the World

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

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

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

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University of Georgia

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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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Harper College

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

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

A Mission of Creating Compassionate Citizens

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

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

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

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

Building Sustainable Links

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

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

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

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

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Developing Clinical Skills Through International Service

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

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

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

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

Creating a Culture of Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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Baldwin Wallace University

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

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

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

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

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

Pursuing Excellence Through Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

Partnering to Promote Interdisciplinary Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging Accreditation to Promote Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting Internationalization Through Area Studies Centers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fostering Global Research Engagement for Faculty and Graduate Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advancing TTU’s Global Vision With Strategy

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

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

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

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

Building a Globally Engaged Student Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promoting International Research to Advance Internationalization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engaging in Community Outreach to Foster Individual Understanding

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

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

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

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

Growing Study Abroad and Extending Opportunities to Underrepresented Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offering a U.S. Education in Costa Rica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fostering an Environment for International Student Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facilitating Study Abroad Through Faculty-Led Programs

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

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

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

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

Research Abroad for Engineers at the Turkana Basin Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community Outreach in Madagascar Through Centre ValBio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offering a Stony Brook Degree at SUNY Korea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunities for Internationalization Through Off-Campus Programs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding Opportunities for Undergraduate Research Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

Encouraging Self-Awareness Through Global Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Establishing a Long-standing Footprint in Kenya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating an International Community on Campus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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