Relationship Cultivation

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.” 

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Centralizing International Engagement Efforts

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

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

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

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

Strengthening Ties with Bahrain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Investing in a Presence Abroad Through Global Portals

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

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

Addressing the Barriers to Study Abroad

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elevating Intercultural Knowledge with Global Mountaineers

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

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

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

Providing a Productive Environment for International Students

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

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

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

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

Extending and Internationalizing Health Sciences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A leading research university founded in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1764, Brown University is known for its open curriculum that allows students to become the architects of their own education. Through its strategic planning, myriad study abroad opportunities, and wide spectrum of international student support services, Brown continues to drive its internationalization agenda forward.

Brown University graduate Nothando Adu-Guyamfi was not the typical education abroad student. “I’m from South Africa, so I always joked that I’m already on study abroad,” she says.

Adu-Guyamfi and 10 classmates from Brown traveled to Ghana in January 2019 as part of a social sciences course, “The African Atlantic Diaspora: Race, Memory, Identity, and Belonging,” taught by professor Shontay Delalue. The course looked at the long-lasting ramifications of the transatlantic slave trade and how they impact questions of race and identity in the United States and abroad. The students visited sites such as the slave castles at Elmina and Cape Coast and tied them back to their own lived experiences. All travel expenses were covered through Brown’s Global Experiential Learning and Teaching (GELT) grant program.

Adu-Guyamfi hadn’t planned on studying abroad when she enrolled at Brown, but she couldn’t pass up the chance to take the course with Delalue, who serves as vice president for institutional equity and diversity. “What drew me to that class was my experience in coming to America as a black person and not necessarily initially understanding the social dynamics of that,” Adu-Guyamfi says.

As a member of Brown’s International Student Advisory Board, Adu-Guyamfi has had conversations with many other students about how their identities, “both those that they acknowledge and recognize and those that are put upon them when they come here,” shape their experience in the United States.

“Understanding my positionality was something that was eye-opening for me,” Adu-Guyamfi says. “The discussions we had and the framework that we were looking at definitely helped me grapple with my time here at Brown and understand what it means to be a black international student.” Adu-Guyamfi’s time abroad and participation in Delalue’s class added additional dimensions to those conversations.

Prior to her current position as chief diversity officer, Delalue served as dean and director of international student experience. Her own experience working in international education and diversity services has helped to elevate the discussion of identity and student experience both in her classroom and across the institution. “I am proud that we are really thinking about internationalization and its intersections with domestic diversity,” Delalue says.

Fostering Internationalization Through Strategic Planning

A focus on identity, inclusion, and the student experience has become a cornerstone of Brown’s global engagement. Internationalization at Brown took on new momentum in 2016 with the launch of Global Brown, a plan that guides the university’s international partnerships, research and curriculum, education abroad programming, and support for international students and scholars.

After becoming provost in 2015, Richard Locke tasked Deputy Provost for Global Engagement and Strategic Initiatives Shankar Prasad with developing an operational blueprint to help integrate a global perspective into the university’s 10-year strategic plan, Building on Distinction. The idea was that internationalization, much like diversity and inclusion, should be integrated into the institution’s strategic priorities.

To accomplish this task, Prasad first wanted to take stock of how the university might better support “Brown in the World” and “The World at Brown,” looking at outbound mobility and engagement abroad as well as the international community that exists on campus in Providence, respectively.

Prasad began by talking to stakeholders across campus to identify areas where there were gaps of support. Those conversations led to both organizational and structural changes. To streamline Brown’s global engagement, various international initiatives were centralized under the Office of Global Engagement (OGE), which reports directly to the provost. The OGE helps to coordinate activities between units such as the Office of International Programs, which oversees education abroad, and the Office of International Student & Scholar Services, which offers immigration support.

The OGE also created a new position focused on international travel safety and security that serves the entire institution. In this role, director Christine Sprovieri has developed a number of policies and procedures to help mitigate risk for student, staff, and faculty travel, and she created an emergency response plan.

In addition to providing resources and hiring more staff to support international students, Brown opened up a dedicated center for the international population. “Students don’t care who reports to whom in this university; they just want to know where to go,” Prasad explains. “So we created a one-stop shop.”

“Most of us still continue to report to different parts of the university, but we make up Global Brown,” he continues. “The idea is that the 40 people who support internationalization, whether that’s going abroad or coming here, are united by this common mission.”

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Tying Partnerships to Strategic Priorities

During the development of the internationalization blueprint, Provost Locke wanted to make sure that Brown’s approach to global partnerships supported the university’s strategic plan. “Brown’s approach to global engagement had been similar to many universities’, and focused on entering a number of MOUs with organizations all over the world,” he says. “We decided to rethink this, undertake a careful review, and continue with the ones that align with Brown’s academic strengths and priorities and have substantive activity taking place.”

Shaira Kochubaeva, associate director for global engagement, oversees all aspects of Brown’s international partnerships to advance its international efforts in the areas of research, teaching, and service. The OGE team has adopted a “less is more” approach by focusing on approximately 75 robust partnerships, the majority of which are concentrated in Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, South Korea, and Spain. Brown also aims to establish more institutional partnerships that encourage a multidisciplinary approach and involve different departments around campus.

One example is Brown’s long-standing relationship with Charles University in the Czech Republic. Starting with a faculty collaboration in Slavic linguistics, the partnership now extends to American studies, applied mathematics, classics, East Asian studies, Egyptology and Assyriology, history, Italian studies, and Slavic studies.

Brown is in the process of planning a new pan-university center for global health that will support research, education, and service in four focus areas: global health and migration/displacement, global health and gender/gender equity, current and emerging epidemics, and global aging. The key values will be to promote health and well-being for all people of all ages around the world; advance social justice, emphasizing equity, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability; and ensure transparency and accountability in all partnerships, local to global, according to Susan Cu-Uvin, director of the current Global Health Initiative. The working committee is led by Susan Short, director of the Population Studies and Training Center.

Leveraging Networks to Expand Study Abroad

One of the outcomes of Brown’s emphasis on productive partnerships is that more than 500 Brown students study outside of the United States each year, facilitated by the Office of International Programs (OIP). Brown-sponsored programs currently operate in 13 countries. The majority of participants spend at least a semester abroad, though Brown also offers short-term programs to Ireland, Italy, Russia, and Spain.

Since 2014, Brown has led the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad (CASA). The group is made up of 12 comprehensive research institutions, including the University of Melbourne in Australia and Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Prior to the creation of CASA, a number of the consortium members were running separate programs in the same cities. By working together, they can better attain a “critical mass of students,” says Kendall Brostuen, OIP director.

Another benefit is being able to leverage the partnerships that CASA members have with local universities. At many of CASA’s locations, the strength of the consortium opens doors to learning opportunities beyond the classroom, including internships, community engagement, and undergraduate research.

“We’re able to take advantage of the vast network that our universities have in those locations,” Brostuen explains. “If we are able to pool our resources, it can be much more beneficial for our students, and we can think strategically when it comes to investing in these programs.”

Recent graduate Nicole Comella, who studied public health, took part in the CASA program in Havana, Cuba. “The program is run out of Casa de las Américas, which is essentially one of the most renowned cultural institutions in the city,” she says. “We have classes within the consortium with Cuban professors, and they’re pretty well-known Cuban academics. And then you also have the choice to take classes with the University of Havana.”

Every 5 years, CASA identifies a theme that transcends national boundaries to promote undergraduate research and faculty engagement. “We want to use these institutional relationships on the ground with key partner universities as a catalyst for faculty engagement,” Brostuen says. “To this end, we have opportunities, for example, for faculty and researchers from the partner university to actually carry out research that is funded by the consortium.”

Cultivating Research and Experiential Learning Abroad

During her time abroad, Comella also completed a photojournalism project on the Cuban health care system through Brown’s Global Independent Study Project (GLISP). Students work with a Brown professor to pursue an independent research project, and they receive funding for any local travel that might be required. More than 225 students have undertaken research abroad through GLISP over the last 10 years.

“GLISP encourages students who are going abroad to actually carry out research on a particular theme that they could never explore here in the United States,” Brostuen says. “The purpose of this is really to tie the international experience back to Brown.”

Makedah Hughes participated in a Brown-sponsored program to Paris where she studied comparative literature and French studies at the Sorbonne. Her GLISP project was a comparative analysis of how black identity is expressed in French literature and music. “Personally, I have always been really interested in black identity or Afro-descendants in French spaces,” Hughes says. “It was so hard to do that kind of work here at Brown because there’s just not a large population of francophone black folks here. It was great to be in that community and to make connections like that.” Hughes’s connections from the program also helped her to successfully apply for an English Teaching Assistant Fulbright to France in fall 2019.

In addition to GLISP, Brown has supported faculty and graduate student research abroad through the Global Mobility Grant since 2015. The program provides funding to faculty who seek to conduct short-term research abroad and graduate students who wish to devote a summer or semester conducting pre-dissertation research at an international institution.

A fifth-year PhD student in comparative literature, Edvidge Crucifix used the grant to travel to North Africa and her native France to do archival research. “The grant really was the turning point in my research. It completely changed what I was doing,” she says.

Global studies and reflective cultural awareness are also elements woven into Brown’s executive master’s programs (EMBA) for mid-career adult students. EMBA students study in South Africa and explore the challenge of entrepreneurship in Cape Town’s townships, while students in other programs study comparative international health care systems and learn about corporate science and technology practices in South Korea, according to Karen Sibley, dean of the School of Professional Studies.

Brown also sends students abroad through the GELT program, which embeds a travel component into a longer course. Faculty can apply for a course development grant with the possibility of securing an additional $35,000 to cover travel costs for up to 12 students. GELT course topics have included Delalue’s course on the African Atlantic diaspora and another on the geology of volcanoes in Greece. Since 2014, between three and five faculty have received funding each year.

“When faculty apply to teach GELT courses, we’re looking at how explicit they’re making the learning goals for the course and how the travel component of the course can actually help students achieve those learning goals,” explains Sarah Mullen, chief of staff and assistant director of curricular programs in the College. Brown is distinctively known as a University-College, with undergraduate education based in the College.

In addition to the many ways in which Brown undergraduates are inspired to study abroad, Brown’s pre-college program offers multiple study abroad opportunities each summer, demonstrating the value placed on global experience to prospective Brown undergraduates.

Supporting International Students Through the Global Brown Center

Global Brown also focuses heavily on the international community on campus. Seventeen percent of the university’s 7,000 undergraduates are international. At the graduate level, 42 percent of master’s students and more than half of doctoral students come from abroad. The top sending countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and Turkey.

Supporting international students and scholars at Brown is part of President Christina Paxson’s vision for comprehensive internationalization. “One of Brown’s greatest strengths is our diverse, global community. We value the more than 2,000 international students and scholars who are essential to our university. And the ideas, experiences, and perspectives they bring are critical to our capacity to engage in teaching, research, and service with excellence and distinction,” Paxson says. “We are committed to attracting the most talented and promising students and scholars from all countries of origin, cultures, races, religions, identities, and experiences, and to cultivating an environment that ensures the free exchange of ideas and advancement of knowledge.”

That commitment begins with open, ongoing dialogue with international students about their goals and needs. In her former position as dean of international student experience, Delalue spent much of her time talking to international students about what they really needed from the university. “A big part of my responsibility was to assess the landscape and really help the senior-level administration understand what would be needed to best support international students,” Delalue says.

She created the International Student Advisory Board as a forum for international students to share their experiences and concerns. One of their recommendations was to reserve a dedicated space on campus for the international population. Students also expressed a clear need for more academic and extracurricular support.

In response, the Global Brown Center for International Students (GBC) was established under campus life in May 2017. Several months later, Brown opened the Global Brown Lounge, known as “the Globe,” which provides a physical space for international students. The GBC has the same status as other affinity centers on campus such as the Brown Center for Students of Color, the LGBTQ Center, and the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender. Any student who identifies as international— including students with immigrant backgrounds and U.S. citizens who grew up abroad—is welcome.

Former GBC program director Christina Bonnell, along with a staff of 12 students, ran a mentoring program and planned orientation and other programming for international students. The GBC currently works with 40 internationally focused student organizations.

Ramisa Fariha, a biomedical engineering master’s student from Bangladesh, works in the GBC as a community fellow responsible for organizing events for international graduate students. She is also a member of the International Student Advisory Board. “Being a part of the advisory board is really cool because you’re actually involved with identifying problems pertaining to international students,” she says.

Fariha has coordinated events such as a healthy meal prep night led by a former international student who now runs her own start-up company. “We’re always cooped up in our labs or doing research, so we need a few social events,” Fariha says.

Designing Programming for International Student Success

In support of the international community, Brown created academic dean positions to serve as advisers to both international undergraduate and graduate students. Part of the rationale for the new positions was that “no student should come here and feel like they have no idea how to navigate the college experience,” Prasad says.

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Some international undergraduates, for example, might need help in understanding Brown’s open curriculum, which means that there are no core curriculum or distribution requirements that students must complete in order to graduate. Students are able to choose the classes that most interest them and, in some cases, design their own major, known as a “concentration” at Brown.

As the associate dean for international undergraduate students, Asabe Poloma has focused on identifying some of the academic barriers and challenges preventing international students from thriving. She has started conversations with faculty and advising deans about culturally relevant pedagogy and inclusive advising practices and worked with the campus career center, CareerLAB, to bring attention to professional development for international students.

“We try to approach all of our programming with the intention of thinking about the international student identity and experience as an asset,” Poloma says.

Divya Mehta, a former international student and Brown graduate, was hired as the first international student career coordinator. Working with Poloma, she co-organized an annual undergraduate career conference and helped connect international students with Brown alumni. “This year, we had alumni from several different fields and industries come in to create a first step to mentorship, but also have the opportunity for students to understand what their career trajectory could look like,” says Mehta, who recently left her position to attend graduate school at London School of Economics.

Creating Spaces for International Graduate Students

The international graduate student population at Brown has grown rapidly over the last decade in tandem with the expansion of its master’s programs. Because Brown as an institution is largely focused on undergraduate teaching, international graduate students advocated for a dedicated support person for their particular needs.

Coming out of the Global Brown strategic planning process, “we knew we needed someone to be the point person for international grad students,” says Shayna Kessel, the associate dean of master’s education and interim associate dean for international graduate students.

The international graduate students “were using these undergraduate resources to try to resolve housing issues, tax issues, social issues, and nobody really knew what to do for them,” she adds.

As the associate dean of master’s education, Kessel was already serving as the primary adviser for many of Brown’s international graduate students. So it made sense to appoint her as the point person for international graduate students. “What we’ve taken away from me being in this position for a year is that there has to be a physical connection between the Graduate School and Global Brown,” she says.

Third-year PhD student Sophie Brunau-Zaragoza has been the chair of international advocacy on the Graduate Student Council for the last 2 years. She says the biggest part of her job has been asking how new policies and programs might impact international graduate students. “There’s usually a very easy solution to include international grad students. It’s just that no one else had thought about it,” she says.

Brunau-Zaragoza worked closely with Bonnell at the Global Brown Center to revamp the international graduate student orientation. “We got rid of as much of possible of the academic structure,” she says.

A concrete example of the changes that Kessel has been able to make is allowing graduate students to have their degrees conferred at multiple points during the year. Students were staying in Providence longer than they needed to because they were unable to get jobs at home without a physical diploma. Brown turned out to be the only Ivy League institution that only conferred degrees once a year.

“Just knowing international graduate student needs and being able to do something about it, and having really receptive administrators, has been really important,” Kessel says.

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