Latitudes

Advising the person, not just the student

The word “academic” is right there in Frank Gaertner’s title — he’s senior associate director of academic advising for international students at Emory University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

But Gaertner doesn’t think of his job as limited to guiding students about what happens in the classroom. He spends all day, every day, talking with many of the college’s nearly 900 international students. They discuss courses and majors, naturally, but conversations often veer into hobbies, homesickness, and adjustment to life in America.

“I tell them, I’m not just concerned about you as a student,” Gaertner said. “I care about you as a person.”

Last month I wrote about the distinct hurdles students from abroad face when first coming to study in the United States and how one institution, Syracuse University, is tackling international-student success. How are other colleges helping foreign students navigate the sometimes rocky transition, I wondered.

Gaertner was among the readers I heard from. He leads a team of three advisers dedicated to working with international students. But Emory didn’t always have such a robust approach. When Gaertner first began in advisement, nearly a decade ago, he only worked with male South Korean students who were returning to college after completing their mandatory military service, and he balanced that with other responsibilities.

Gaertner and his colleagues quickly saw a need, however. In 2016, he shifted to international academic advising full time.

His work begins as soon as students are admitted to Emory. He monitors the Instagram account for the incoming first-year class, posting individual welcome messages to international students, and follows that up with emails once he gets the official class roster. Like Syracuse, Emory hosts predeparture orientation programs tailored to foreign students on the ground, in Seoul, Shanghai, and Mumbai, and Gaertner dedicates a lot of time responding to parents’ questions and concerns. “My gray hair helps,” he joked. By the time students arrive for classes, he has memorized their names and faces.

Gaertner works to build trust by being a regular presence in his students’ lives. In addition to his open-door policy, he routinely attends club meetings and social events. On a recent weekend, he had been to a Korean cultural night and a celebration of Holi, the Indian festival marking the arrival of spring.

Gaertner works closely with student-support services like counseling and residence life and said it’s rare that when he gets reports of an international student struggling, he doesn’t already know the student. Personal relationships are an important foundation “when a crisis occurs and you have to go from zero to 60,” he said.

Kaushiki Ravi, a sophomore neuroscience major from India, had such a good experience with a peer-mentoring program Gaertner started that she signed up to help other international students. “I’m a shy kid, and I emailed them about everything,” including undergraduate research and vegetarian dining options, Ravi said of her mentors.

Having familiar faces around helped ease her transition to campus. “It was kind of like a soft entry,” she said. “It was like a gentle walk in.”

Rather than feel stigmatized because of their differences, Gaertner wants international students to feel celebrated. “We want them to know that they have someone who cares about them because they’re international.”

Helping graduate students with writing

International graduate students are often thrown into the deep end: From the very start of their programs, they are expected to turn out sophisticated, and frequently highly technical, papers in a language they are not fluent in.

The University of South Florida wants to throw them a lifeline, of sorts. The institution has started a multilingual writing center to support international students and other nonnative English speakers at the graduate level.

The center is the brain child of Matthew Kessler, an assistant professor of applied linguistics, and Sean Farrell, a doctoral student. Kessler said he often heard from fellow faculty members concerned about the quality of foreign graduate students’ writing but unsure of how to give them the support they need. “From the faculty standpoint, they know they have issues, but they don’t know how to address them,” he said.

South Florida has a universitywide writing center, but it wasn’t equipped to help the institution’s roughly 2,500 international graduate students. Much of its tutoring was focused on undergraduates, and it had limited expertise in working with writers whose first language was not English, Kessler said. (He and Farrell consulted with the university writing center in planning, and it now refers students to them.)

For many students who are new to studying in the United States, this may be the first in-depth writing they have done in English. What’s more, at the graduate level, the papers they are working on are typically complex and discipline specific, with distinct conventions and vocabulary, said Farrell, who has a background in teaching English composition.

Much of Farrell’s tutoring work focuses on grammatical and other writing rules. That may include discussions of plagiarism and proper citation, which can be viewed differently in other cultural contexts. “We talk about how to paraphrase, how to put your own spin on it,” he said.

Farrell emphasized that very little of his work is about refining students’ ideas, but rather about how to package information clearly and effectively. “These are graduate students and amazingly smart,” he said. “The content they have a handle on. It’s just, how do I structure it?”

Kessler noted that the pair started small a year ago, with Farrell, who is a graduate teaching assistant, as the only tutor. But the pilot was successful — they surveyed each student about the tutoring experience — and graduate-school administrators have agreed to fund the center. Next year, it will have an additional tutor, as well as a staff member to handle administrative and marketing tasks.

For Farrell, the effort has had an additional benefit: His dissertation focuses on revision strategies of multilingual graduate students, the very population he now tutors.

A few more ideas for international-student success

Gerardo L. Blanco, academic director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, told me colleges can do more to prepare faculty members to support international students.

For example, campus centers for teaching and learning could offer more faculty-development programming focused specifically on the needs of foreign students. They could also organize “reflective groups” that allow faculty members to share best practices and strategies, rather than leaving it up to individual professors to figure out what does, or doesn’t, work, Blanco said. “We should make faculty front and center in institutional internationalization.”

Blanco is also a co-author of a case study looking at the impact of globally focused living-learning communities on international-student integration. Because foreign students often choose to live with others from their home country, housing can be a barrier to making the transition to the United States, and these communities can bring together American and international students under one roof. It’s also a way for students to get to better know faculty members who work with living-learning communities.

But Blanco and his co-authors found that some international students may still be intimidated to mix with professors or their American classmates. And space is limited in living-learning communities, so students often can’t take part in their sophomore year.

At the University of Pennsylvania, international and domestic students come together for an intercultural-leadership program that helps them learn more about cultures and communities other than their own.

Rodolfo R. Altamirano, who serves as the executive director of two offices at Penn, international student and scholar services as well as immigration services and integration programs, knows firsthand as a former international student that colleges need to “proactively develop an infrastructure” to spur integration. In addition to student-focused programming, Altamirano has created a working group that brings administrators from across campus to discuss issues facing international students, and offers workshops to other offices on intercultural communication. He’s held 15 sessions for the public-safety department alone.

Altamirano compares getting students a visa to study in the United States to giving them access to a car. “But integration is the accessories of the car,” he said. “It makes the ride feel nice.”

Around the globe

A professor at Southern Illinois University who was acquitted on the most serious charges under the China Initiative, the federal investigation of academic ties to China, has resumed his campus duties. But The Daily Egyptian reports Mingqing Xiao will focus more on teaching than research.

An Indiana woman has been charged with a federal hate crime after she allegedly stabbed a student of Chinese descent at Indiana University at Bloomington.

In a survey of more than 21,000 current and prospective students, about half said they were reconsidering their decision to study overseas because of cost. Another survey of international-student recruitment agents also highlighted concerns about affordability.

For students interested in studying abroad, a college’s study-abroad options and its support of education abroad can affect their college-selection decision.

The Stevens Initiative announced its new grantees, which it said will help connect 20,000 young people in the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa through virtual exchanges.

Students and professors have been caught in the crossfire and killed in fighting between rival military forces in Sudan.

Students at Indian universities will be allowed to write exams in their local language, even for courses taught in English.

Want to know what the demographic cliff might look like for American colleges? Look to Japan.

A Russian technological university plans to set up a campus in China, a sign of closer research and academic ties between the two countries.

“Jubilant posts across social media announcing booked research trips and academic reunions on the horizon belie the fragility of the current international research infrastructure,” one researcher wrote concerning the uncertain landscape for scholars of China. For background, check out my piece about how politics and war have complicated the study of Russia as well as China.

And finally …

Change. These days, it can seem like the only constant in international education. So what does the future hold for the field? How can educators navigate constantly evolving challenges? And where are new opportunities for growth?

Join The Chronicle on Tuesday, May 2, at 2 p.m. ET for an exciting conversation about the future of international education. I’ll be moderating the discussion between a group of expert panelists:

• Fanta Aw, chief executive and executive director, NAFSA: Association of International Educators
  
• Meredith McQuaid, international-education consultant and former associate vice president and dean of international programs, University of Minnesota
  
• Jewell Winn, deputy chief diversity officer and executive director for international programs, Tennessee State University, and past president, Association of International Education Administrators

The virtual forum is free, but registration is required. Sign up here. Do you have questions for my all-star speakers? You can send them to me in advance at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

Also feel free to email me with ideas or news tips — I always welcome your feedback. You can connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn, too. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here. Thanks for reading!