Sarah McNitt

College

I majored in French at Albion College, with the dual goals of becoming fluent in French and studying abroad in France. During my first semester I participated in a First-Year Seminar called "To France and Back." The class focused on cross-cultural communication, using the U.S. and France as examples. It also included a 10-day visit to Albion College's study abroad programs in Paris and Grenoble and a homestay in Albion, Michigan's sister-city, Noisy-le-Roi. This was the most influential class I have ever taken, and gave me the tools and anthropological vocabulary to process later international education experiences.

I spent my junior year of college studying in Grenoble, France at the Centre Universitaire d'Études Françaises, an international student center within the Université de Grenoble III. I took classes in French history, cinema, literature and art history in French as well as taking French language classes. I met students from all over the world and lived with a French host family, who included me in their family activities. I am still in close contact with my host family and visit them whenever I return to France. I also had many opportunities to travel during my year in France and visited Switzerland, Belgium, England and Scotland as well as travelling around France.

When I returned to Albion for my senior year, I wanted to put my recent experience to use. As I had recently been an international student in a new country myself, I volunteered as an orientation leader for incoming international students. This consisted of giving them not only the general orientation information that is offered to all incoming students, but also introducing them to a new and unfamiliar cultural environment. Following the end of the orientation period, these students formed the International Student Union, a new organization at Albion College. I participated in the organization as secretary and later as its president. The International Student Union has sponsored information fairs, dances, meals and other events to inform the Albion College community about international diversity.

Soon after I graduated from college, I spent three weeks in Copiapó, Chile, traveling and living with the family of a college friend. All of my previous travel experience had been in North America and Europe, so it was valuable to branch out into a new continent.

Teaching Abroad

Following this, I spent a year as a teaching assistant in a high school near Vichy in the center of France. The teaching assistantship program is sponsored by the French government in order to bring native speakers into French classrooms. In this position, I created activities, games and lessons to encourage students to speak English and helped upper-level students prepare for oral exams. The school I was assigned to was a "technical and professional" school, where students were studying particular trades including optometry, hospitality, sales and healthcare. I worked with many different groups of students from the various subject areas and I probably learned as much new English vocabulary as my students did!

My fellow language assistants were very influential and helped me to learn a lot about France and the French language. Due to our work schedules, our travelling was mainly restricted to the region around Vichy, which gave me a deep understanding of that particular area. In some ways, I found it more valuable than the traveling I had done while studying abroad, because rather than visiting Geneva, London or Brussels on the level of a tourist, I was getting to know one area quite well. What's more, the center of France is rarely visited by foreign tourists, so both in my classrooms and in my travels, I met many people who had never been to America or had never known an American before. It was an important responsibility to be so representative of my country and to be able to share my version of the United States with them.

Graduate School

While I was teaching, I applied to graduate school at the University of Michigan School of Information. I was accepted into the Master's program in Human-Computer Interaction and planned to go on for a career in web design, something that had always been an interest of mine, but in which I had no formal training.

At Michigan I studied usability, user interface design, information architecture, PHP/MySQL and Java as well as general information management: the creation, transmission, organization, display, storage and retrieval of information in all of its forms. I took classes in library reference services, marketing, human behavior and organization, contextual design and consulting to enrich my human-computer interaction coursework. I continue to find many connections between information management and international education and to apply what I learned to my career.

While studying for my degree, I took a part-time job as Webmaster and Peer Advisor in the University of Michigan Overseas Opportunities Office. After two years in that position and a summer web development internship with an international education organization in France, I realized that I was more interested in helping students to have valuable study abroad experiences than I was in working in the web design field.

Professional Career

Miami University

Communication with Students

When I started at Miami in 2005, one of my first projects was the redesign of the Office of International Education website, which improved our ability to communicate study abroad program and procedure information online. Another early project was the creation of a monthly study abroad email newsletter which now goes out to over 3000 Miami students, faculty, staff and parents. Other web-based communication efforts, such as our work with Facebook and Twitter, are discussed in the Technology section of this site.

Newsletter sample stories:

• Going it Alone: Testing and Gaining Independence (December 2009)
• Featured Study Abroad Location of the Month: Botswana (November 2009)
• Host Families (October 2009)

In the advising process, we have also worked to improve and standardize the information we give to students by creating the Study Abroad 101 information session, a 30 minute group advising session offered four times a week in our office. This information session allows us to share general information with several students at once and help them start their research before later meeting one-on-one with a study abroad advisor. This allows us to use our one-on-one advising time more efficiently and to give students as much or as little individual attention as they require.

Communication with Academic Departments

Faculty members are often extremely influential in a student's decision-making process. They may be the ones who open a student's mind to learning more about a particular place, or they may discourage a student from "wasting their time with study abroad trips", so that the students seek out additional information or second opinions about study abroad. Opening the lines of communication with academic departments is therefore very important for student recruitment and for encouraging students to make educated, strategic study abroad decisions.

One problem that we initially faced was that some departments did not know that our office existed or where it was located. Others did not trust our office, and believed that study abroad distracted students from their academic and professional goals. Once they saw our approach to study abroad, our efforts to tie students' study abroad decisions to longer-term goals, and the range of study abroad options available, they were very willing to speak to their students about study abroad. These conversations have also helped us to better understand the academic departments' goals, the course offerings and the future career paths for students in those departments.

I've found that while a part of my job is to open students' eyes to the cultural assumptions they make, I've had to face professional assumptions of my own. While it did not seem an obvious ally, our School of Engineering and Applied Science has been one of the most supportive academic bodies in our curricular integration efforts, and has invited us to speak about the importance and accessibility of study abroad in all first-year engineering courses. Where many engineering students previously assumed they could not study abroad (or were told so by their professors or academic advisors), they are now learning about their options early on, and are able to integrate study abroad into their academic plan.

NAFSA Involvement

I also maintain communication with study abroad providers and with colleagues in the field through reading and posting on SECUSS-L. I have been a member of NAFSA since 2005, and regularly attend regional and national NAFSA conferences.

• NAFSA 2005 Region VI conference (Louisville, KY)
• NAFSA 2006 national conference (Montreal, QC, Canada)
• NAFSA 2006 Region VI conference (Columbus, OH)
• NAFSA 2007 national conference (Minneapolis, MN)
• NAFSA 2007 Region VI conference (Indianapolis, IN)
• NAFSA 2008 national conference (Washington, DC)
• NAFSA 2008 Region VI conference (Lexington, KY)
• NAFSA 2009 national conference (Los Angeles, CA)
  Session presented: Study Abroad in a Transparent World
• NAFSA 2009 Region VI conference (Cincinnati, OH)
  Serving on local planning committee
• NAFSA 2010 Region VI Ohio Drive-In Conference (Columbus, OH)
  Session presented: Social Media and the International Education Office
• NAFSA 2010 national conference (Kansas City, MO)
  Workshops attended: Managing the Education Abroad Office; Basic Immigration Concepts for Professionals Outside International Student Advising

Site Visits

I have made site visits to observe the study abroad opportunities in the following locations:

Israel, March 2006

• Tel Aviv University
• Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
• Hebrew University
• University of Haifa

England/Ireland, October 2006

• Richmond, the American International University
• University of Limerick
• Royal Holloway, University of London

Semester at Sea, July 2007

• Sailed/docked with the ship from San Diego, CA to Acapulco, Mexico

Shanghai, China, September 2008

• CIEE Shanghai
• IES Shanghai
• The Alliance for Global Education Shanghai
• EducAsian

Other Professional Development

Academic Coursework

Another element of my professional development has been my study of Arabic. I audited two years of Arabic courses with Miami students, which gave me an opportunity to interact with them in a different setting. Thanks to my professional travel to Israel and my Arabic studies, I am now the advisor responsible for study abroad programs in the Middle East.

Leadership and Service

I served on the Miami University Student Affairs Council from 2006 to 2009. I have also been an active member of Miami's Unclassified Personnel Advisory Committee (UPAC) from 2008 to present, serving as Networking Chair for the 2008-09 year. Starting in 2009-10, I am a Wellness Captain for our Employee Health and Well-Being Office, helping that office to disseminate information about health and well-being activities on campus.

© 2006-2010 Sarah McNitt