international education

For international students coming to the U.S., the first few weeks are a time of change and upheaval—everything seems new, from how classes work to the food. With those changes come new hopes, goals, and survival strategies. In celebration of International Education Week, Larisa, A Muskie graduate fellow from Belarus, offers some reminders on how to make the most of your time as an international student in the U.S.

Don Allan Mitchell is an assistant professor of English at Delta State University. The article below was an opinion column originally edited by Jordan Thomas and published in May 2012 in the Cleveland Current and the Delta Business Journal.

Recently at Delta State, we said farewell to our friends from the Global UGRAD program: Sirojiddin, Ecaterina, Susanna, David, and Akzer. The U.S. State Department sponsors global UGRAD in Cleveland, Mississippi and similar college towns like Kearney, Nebraska and Troy, Alabama. The highly selective exchange invites university students from Eurasia, to spend a year in residence at U.S. colleges, where they serve as ambassadors for their home countries and learn about American history, culture, and government. I, for one, have learned a lot from these five students.

Last month we discovered that our enthusiasm about exchange 2.0 was exceeded only by that of our international exchange students in Pakistan. A select group of forty students, all alumni of the Global UGRAD-Pakistan program, shattered every quantifiable participation record at TechChange for online learning. Read more from guest bloggers Gerard McCarthy and Christopher Neu.

I’ve been fortunate to visit four IREX field offices and one theme loudly surfaces each time- Muskie alumni are everywhere. I hear about their great work from our country directors. I run into them on the streets on my way to meet other alumni.

I recently traveled to Luhansk, Ukraine, to witness alumni of the Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program in action. In a region filled with challenges—lagging industry, political division, and unemployment—one alumnus I met with is offering hope and driving positive change. Meet Volodymyr Shcherbachenko , who started a local NGO, the East Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives (EUCCI), which currently works to protect homeowner’s rights and open spaces like parks, forests, and neighborhoods.

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.

Language transcends borders. That’s why I began studying Arabic six years ago. But when I met with female activists in a café in Fez yesterday, we used three (plus) languages to discuss challenges facing youth in Morocco. I asked questions in classical Arabic or fus-ha, and they answered in French with interludes in the local Moroccan dialect — an amalgam of Berber, fus-ha, and French. I summarized in fus-ha what I had pieced together, and they confirmed my accuracy with nods and giggles.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of my first trip to the Soviet Union. Actually it was my first trip anywhere across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans for that matter.