Blog Post

We are pleased to post this blog from an international student offering a different perspective as we celebrate International Education Week. Marika Mkheidze is a Global UGRAD student from Georgia studying at Utica College for the 2010-2011 school year.

Annie Curran is a senior at Annandale High School and the Editor-in-Chief of its newspaper. This past summer, she and five other Annandale students traveled to Lanzhou, China, to participate in an IREX journalism program with 100 of their Chinese peers.

My high school is extremely diverse, which has afforded me the opportunity to learn about a variety of different cultures. I had never traveled out of the country, which is why I was so excited about this opportunity.

I grew up in the heartland of America listening to rhetoric about the “Evil Empire” and the nuclear arms race. My school didn’t have a globalized curriculum; the student body was not diverse. Yet, I was compelled to learn more about the world; to make it a better place. My story is not unique.

In celebration of International Education Week, Betsy Engebretson provides an IREX Russia perspective on the value of studying abroad and the changes she has witnessed working with international students. 

The streets of Monrovia were bustling at 6:30 that morning. Though Monrovians are early risers, this was unusual for a holiday morning. But of course this was an unusual holiday - October 11, 2011, Election Day. 

On behalf of IREX, I am pleased to extend our congratulations to the U.S. Agency for International Development on its 50th Anniversary. With less than one half of one percent of the federal budget to work with across the globe, USAID has saved millions of lives from devastating disease while helping people and countries develop into more prosperous, peaceful, and democratic societies.

The Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC), a nonprofit network of research and training centers in the South Caucasus, recently released a report by Georgian journalist Mariam Naskidashvili that provides some fascinating insights on Georgians’ attitudes toward work, education, and behaviors as they relate to gender.

The Youth Theater for Peace (YTP) team is very excited to share some more impact news from the program in Tajikistan!

Recently we shared a story about Faroiz, a teenage girl whose work raising awareness about child marriage and education with the local YTP theater group helped inspire 20 girls in her community to continue to 11th grade (the final year of secondary school in Tajikistan.)

I've had the pleasure of chairing research fellowship panels for over a decade. In these years I’ve heard debate surrounding nearly 3,000 applicants, both junior and senior scholars, all trying to secure very limited research funding.  A while back some colleagues in the academic community encouraged me to pull some tips together from my experience in these meetings and also having worked with so many different peer reviewers over the years, from a variety of disciplines. Here it goes:

When I began working with journalists, editors and civil society leaders- and the public they serve- in countries where media freedom is not a given, one of the first things I noticed was the low expectations that government should be accountable to its citizens. As a taxpayer and voter in the United States, I have a very vivid perception that I own a share of what government does and that I have a right to know in almost all cases how it goes about it.