The International Student Blog

Glee, the popular American musical comedy-drama satire television series is going international with the international pop star Charice joining the cast as an international exchange student. Charice rose to popularity mainly via Youtube, but is now a worldwide singing sensation thanks to support from people like Oprah Winfrey. Details of who she will be playing are still not 100% clear, but she will be joining season 3 as an exchange student from Asia.

Now most of our readers may think this is a slightly off topic blog post for us – however we wanted to highlight this as we feel introducing an exchange student into a show as popular as Glee can only mean a good thing for international student exchange. It will raise not only awareness for international education and student exchange, but bring to masses of young teenage kids the idea that studying abroad is “cool” and “fun”. You can view the full article online here.

What do you think? Will it impact international student exchange for the better?

THE SARA’S WISH FOUNDATION

In 1996, Sara Schewe, a student at Georgetown University, was killed, along with 3 other students from her program, while taking a bus in India to see the Taj Mahal. Since that time, Charles and Anne Schewe have dedicated themselves to bringing awareness on how to minimize safety issues while traveling abroad.

Since 1996, there have been a number of advances in the materials and information available from the U.S. government, colleges, universities and study abroad programs, other organizations, as well as support available through insurance and emergency assistance providers. There have also been domestic and international meetings and workshops supporting improved health and safety policies and procedures to support U.S. college and university students.

Sara’s Wish Foundation has collaborated with some of these organizations to develop the video “Know Before You Go”, and to put together the information you will find on their website. The information and links are intended to help inform students, parents, and friends who may go abroad or support others who do, that knowing more about good study abroad program practices and health and safety challenges in countries around the world can help students have a healthy and safe time abroad.

Foreign travel and study abroad remains an invaluable learning experience, broadening a student’s world view and enhancing the college experience. While there have been advancements in the field since this incident to ensure student safety, precautions must still be taken, students and families need to research about benefits and risks associated with a particular location and/or program, and understand that the quality of support does vary from institution to institution and from program to program. It is Sara’s Wish Foundation’s hope that together we can avoid tragedies and difficulties as students begin that wondrous adventure to broaden their lives.

For more information, please visit the Sara’s Wish Foundation website where you will find further, excellent information and advice.

Here at InternationalStudent.com, we are horrified at the devastation caused by the earthquake in Haiti, and our thoughts are with the staggering number of people impacted by this disaster.

Schools have been scrambling to locate and evacuate their study abroad students in Haiti.  Lynn University and the University of Florida, among others, have been working around the clock to ensure the safety of their students. You can read the updates that Lynn University provides on its website, and there is also an excellent article by Karin Fischer in the Chronicle of Higher Education talking about location and evacuation efforts.

We wish the very best to all study abroad students in Haiti and hope for their safe return.

There are many ways to contribute to the relief effort. The Red Cross of course has relief operations under way.  You can donate to the Red Cross Haitian relief effort by phone at 1-800-REDCROSS; or online at www.redcross.org.

Or simply text the word “HAITI” to 90999 and a $10 donation will go the Red Cross and be billed to you on your phone bill.

Now that the dust has finally settled on another holiday period, we would like to formally introduce our two new student bloggers into the International Student family. Regular visitors to our site will have already met and know about our new bloggers as they were both winners in our 2009 travel video contest, one actually winning the contest and the other coming in third.

Sandy Florez – Study Abroad Blogger

Sandy was our winner in the 2009 travel video contest with her fantastic video “Hello 2 Ciao” which charted her desire to travel to Italy to study abroad. As part of her prize, Sandy will be blogging about her experiences abroad as she prepares for Italy and both studies and travels over there. She has already started blogging and her posts are excellent so take some time to head over to her blog and check it out!

http://www.internationalstudent.com/study-abroad/blog/

Lindo Lindo – Study in the USA Blogger

Lindo Lindo came third in our 2009 contest, and inspired us all with his funny spoof video “The Study Abroad Show”. Originally from the Philippines, Lindo is taking part in the Global UGrad program and studying at North Central College in Illinois. He brings with him an excellent sense of humour and his posts reflect this so check his blog out! “Lindo Lindo a name so nice you’ll say it twice!”

http://www.internationalstudent.com/study_usa/blog/

Both blogs have an RSS feed which you can sign up to and you can also follow the International Student Twitter Account as new posts will be tweeted out as they happen:

Sandy’s Blog RSS Feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/InternationalStudent-StudyAbroadBlog

Lindo Lindo’s RSS Feed – http://feeds.feedburner.com/study_usa_blog

This is probably one of the best videos I have seen in a long while which charted the adventures of Matt as he traveled…..no actually danced around the world. He did this a while ago, but we still think the video is fantastic and makes us all want to travel the world more! Well worth a watch:

You can also read more about Matt and his traveling adventures on his website “Where the Hell is Matt?”

A topic that was brought up in our international student forums a while ago titled “Sweden – Seriously Free”, was the subject of obtaining an international education in Sweden and whether this was in fact free. After a lot of talking back and forth, it was discovered that for non-EU international students there are in fact no fees to study as an international student at Universities in Sweden.

However, that is all about to change if the Swedish government has their way and a bill is going to be put before the Swedish parliament this fall to discuss and implement fees for international students. But, do not worry if you are planning to studying this year – the bill (if it comes into law) will not come into effect until 2010.

For more information about this please see:
http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/10403/a/107816

If you cannot read Swedish, please try the online website translator at:
http://www.systran.co.uk/

Some great news that has just been released from the Annual Open Doors report is that International Student enrollments saw a 3% increase this past year to a new total of 582,984. This increase is the first significant increase in the number of international students since the 2001/ 2002 year – and shows that the USA is moving forward and rebounding after a few troublesome years.

Even better news is the report of a 10% increase in the number of new students that are enrolled compared with last year.

As for where the students are coming from, Asia is still the largest sender of students to the USA with a share of 59% of total enrollment (up 5%), and with an increase of 25% in the last year, the Middle East is one of the fastest growing sectors for sending to the USA.

For US Students Studying Abroad, this has seen an increase also up 8% to 223,534.

For more information about Studying in the USA, or Studying Abroad please see our website and be sure to check out the full details on the Open Doors Website.

We are launching a new resource for students in the Study Abroad Blog. As you probably know, the winner of our Annual Travel Contest is planning to use his winnings to fund his study in Spain, and we are all going to be able to follow him as he pursues his MBA.

You can view the blog by visiting:
http://www.internationalstudent.com/studyabroad/blog/

So please check it out and be sure to subscribe to the RSS Feed to get your daily updates! You can also visit all our other RSS Feeds by visiting the International Student RSS Feeds pages.

We are also planning to add more international student bloggers to this – so if you want to help out and blog about your time abroad, let us know!

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