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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Melanie Andrich, front, associate
director of the Study Abroad Office in
New Brunswick, and Director Stephen
Ferst work with staff and students
dedicated to international education to
spread the word about the lifelong
benefits of opening hearts and minds to
other cultures. Back, from right to
left: Anna Davda, financial coordinator;
Lindy Black, regional coordinator; Adam
Gibson, student; Marcela Caro, program
assistant; and Jennifer Gutierrez,
student.
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Kenya Mollett’s first weeks in Spain got off to a rocky start. She was one of relatively few Americans on a large (46,000 students) campus and, even more unusual for the University of Valencia, an African-American. “I never felt that alone in my life.”
But that didn’t last long. “After you get the hang of things and you make friends, you get over the fear,” Mollett said. A Spanish major, she threw herself into language studies during the day and experienced the city’s vibrant culture at night. Now she is so fluent in the language she sometimes thinks in Spanish and regards the decision to make the trip last spring as the best one of her 21 years.
Mollett’s original apprehension about foreign travel and then her all-out conversion are fairly typical of Rutgers study abroad participants, university officials say. “Study abroad can be intimidating,” said Melanie Andrich, associate director of the Rutgers Study Abroad office on the New Brunswick campus. “It forces you to leave your comfort zone.”
But the benefits can be immense, say Andrich and her colleague, Director Stephen Ferst. Nearly all of the study abroad alumni Ferst meets say the experience was life-changing and a highlight of their undergraduate career.
“It changes you into a world citizen. It teaches you to empathize with others, what their attitudes are and why they might be that way. Whether the issue is politics, culture, religion, art, it doesn’t matter – you start to see things from the perspective that yours is not the only lens from which to see the world,” Ferst said.
Rutgers offers more than 40 study abroad programs in 22 countries. The number of Rutgers students studying overseas has leveled off at about 400 per year in the last few years, a big leap from the 150 that traveled in 1995 but far below the numbers that Ferst and Andrich would like to see.
In recent years, 6.5 percent to 7 percent of Rutgers graduating seniors have studied abroad, about average for a public state university but not on a par with other top research universities, Ferst said. (By comparison, 40 percent of recent graduating classes at the University of Notre Dame have studied abroad, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.) “I’d like to see 15 to 20 percent of our students having some international experience,” Ferst said.
Toward that end, the Study Abroad office has revamped its marketing materials to make foreign study seem less daunting. In 2003, the program brochure and Web site were redesigned with dozens of color photographs from student travels and easy-to-find information about destinations, subjects and costs.
Allison Thomas, a project manager for University Relations’ Creative Services, said the new recruitment brochure responds to the concerns of a student focus group convened four years ago. “They wanted to see more of where they would be going – more of a sense of place, of where they would be living and what they would be seeing,” she said.
Because sending a photographer around the world was out of the question, Andrich and Ferst called on alumni of Study Abroad programs to send in snapshots from their travels. And they did – submitting hundreds of photos that took the pair 18 months to edit for the brochure and Web site. The result was a brochure, produced by Creative Services, that won several national design awards and a Web site that lets students apply and check the status of their application online.
One page of the Web site (studyabroad.rutgers.edu) takes on the “four myths” that discourage students from studying overseas: that they must already speak a foreign language, have top grades, wait for months to find out if they’ve been admitted and go into debt to pay for a semester or year abroad.
The financial argument can be the hardest to dispel, Andrich said, and in a few cases –full-year programs in Great Britain can cost up to $25,000 plus airfare, housing
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