Faculty Are From Mars, Study-Abroad Officers Are From Venus

The following is a guest post from Mandy Reinig, director of international education at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
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Studying abroad has become an increasingly important role within American higher education. The administrators who run study-abroad offices and faculty members hold a key responsibility in this process. However, there is often a divide in the understanding of the functions they play in the process of turning students into global citizens. This tension can be particularly pronounced between education-abroad professionals and professors since it crosses that ever-contentious faculty/staff divide.

This post addresses the misconceptions education-abroad (EA) professionals feel that faculty have about our role in the study-abroad process. I informally asked a variety of EA professionals about the misconceptions they run into everyday in working with faculty. Those that responded include EA directors, assistant directors, advisers, and coordinators. Every one of them comes into almost daily contact with a misconception by faculty about what their job responsibilities should be. Here are just a few of the most prevalent misconceptions EA professionals face.

• EA professionals are travel agents. We arrange airfare, transportation, housing, tickets to sights, etc. This is probably the most prevailing misconception about EA professionals. We are not travel agents. If we were, we would be able to take advantage of the discounts travel agents receive. We are actually educators who chose to work in higher education because we see the academic, personal, and professional benefits of living, studying, and working in another country, of which we want to aid others in having similar experiences. Most of us don’t get into this field for the travel; in fact many of us don’t get to travel much at all but, are truly concerned with assisting students in pursuing their academic, personal, and career goals in another country.

• We are just paper pushers and our job is to put roadblocks in faculty’s way. While the role of an EA professional may require us to ask for more paperwork than even we would like; the paperwork and extra headaches faculty may have to face in order to run a program is actually for their own protection and that of the college or university. One of our main roles is to make sure that our students and faculty return in the same condition as they left. This may mean asking questions that faculty have not considered, or want to consider, and putting policies and procedures in place, while seeming to be prohibitive, are actually to ensure all participants can travel with minimal fear for their safety.

• Anyone can be an EA professional as long as they have studied, worked or lived abroad. Having experience abroad is important to understanding how the process works and being able to relate to students, it does not an EA professional make. It takes much more than travel experience or a desire to travel to be an effective EA professional. We are educators, budget managers, supervisors, counselors, judicial officers, risk-management directors, program coordinators, advisers, and so much more. In reality, there are few areas within higher education that require attention to so many aspects, outside of the actual presidents or chancellors of the college or university. How many positions in higher education require people to know how to create budgets, understand visa regulations for the entire world, provide logistical support day or night, be able to respond effectively in an emergency, prepare students for studying in another culture (emotionally, academically, etc.) advise for every major on a campus, among so much more. This is why it takes more than previous travel experience to truly be effective in the education abroad field.

While there are many other misconceptions out there about EA professionals, these are a few that are faced routinely by those that work in this field. Hopefully, this gives you just a small glimpse into the complex responsibilities and tasks EA professionals must fulfill on an almost daily basis. This means if you see us stressed or we don’t respond to your e-mail immediately, there is probably a reason why. Few jobs require people to laugh in the face of a game plan for the day and necessitate a need to be like Gumby and adapt to anything and everything.

This discussion is of course not one sided. Faculty members also feel that EA professionals sometimes have misconceptions about their work. A follow-up post will address these.

What do you think are the most common misconceptions of education-abroad staff? On the other side, what misconceptions do you think study-abroad professionals have about faculty members?

[Image courtesy of InsideStudyAbroad.com and Brooke Roberts.]