September 13, 2007
International students increase as global outreach efforts expand
Last year, Kun Zhao didn’t know any other undergraduates from mainland China. This year, the sophomore at the College of Arts and Sciences has welcomed a number of freshmen from her homeland. It may even be that Zhao, and the time she devoted to communicating with admitted students, was part of the reason for the increase.
Fanta Aw, director of ISSS, believes that personal contacts have contributed to this year’s dramatic spike in international enrollments. This year, 52 new international students arrived on campus as freshmen, almost double last year’s number of 31 new freshmen. There are also 141 new master’s students, up from 122 last year. There are currently 1,064 international students enrolled at AU’s schools and colleges.
Students are more likely to attend a university they’ve visited. After all, it’s hard to make a decision to live and study for years at a place you’ve never seen except on a Web site and in glossy brochures.
But for most international students, touring a campus that may be thousands of miles from home isn’t an option. So AU’s office of International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS) came up with another way to help potential students envision life at AU: a friendly phone call.
Students known as AU Diplomats, such as Zhao, reach out to admitted international students in the spring with a congratulatory phone call and an offer to answer questions and share personal insights, by phone or e-mail.
“I think student-to-student contact, and students hearing about others’ experience, goes a long way in helping the student and family make a decision about which university to attend,” Aw says. “Having information come from people who are not seen as trying to sell the university, but sharing their authentic experience, is very important.”
The AU Diplomats spoke to students after they were admitted, but before they had decided whether to attend AU or another university. Zhao fielded a lot of questions.
Some students worried that Americans would be packing guns. “I told them it’s quite a nice neighborhood, and gun shooting is mostly from the movies,” she says.
Others asked about discrimination. “I said we have students from 137 countries, so it’s not like you’re the only one from outside America and people will see you as a panda. I think some schools may be like that, but AU is a very diverse campus, and actually a lot of Americans come here to enjoy this international environment.”
Many also wondered if they’d be able to understand the professors’ English. “Some professors speak so fast, but it’s OK to ask questions,” Zhao told them, “and after class you can go to the professor’s office. If you want to get help about academic things, you can get help from many people.”
Pamela Fernandez ’08, from Honduras, is also among the AU Diplomats. Chatting in Spanish to admitted students from Central and South America, she found that many of them were wondering the same things as their American peers: How was the cafeteria food? What about the night life in Washington, D.C.?
But there were also questions that stemmed from their experiences in very different homelands. How safe, for instance, was Washington’s bus system? “The transportation system here is a lot better,” Hernandez says. “[In many parts of Latin America], you’ve got to be careful, which is why they were concerned. Here, you still need to be careful, you need to be aware, but it’s different.”
The AU Diplomat initiative was started several years ago, but spring and summer of 2007 saw a more concerted level of activity. ISSS and the new director of international admissions, Evelyn Levinson, have found that students who received calls tended to continue their communication with AU, and were often in touch with the diplomats during the summer about housing, the campus climate, and other questions.
“It’s almost a mentoring strategy,” Aw says.
This year, in addition to the new freshmen and master’s students on main campus, there are 68 new LLM students at the Washington College of Law, 64 transfer students, and nine doctoral students. The School of International Service (SIS) is most strongly represented among international students, but there are also significant numbers at the other schools.
The top countries continue to be South Korea, Japan, China, and India, but the number of Vietnamese is rising, as is the number of Chinese undergraduate students. “That’s a sign of economic growth and the rise of the middle and upper classes,” Aw says. “It’s definitely a trend.”
More students are also coming from Egypt and Lebanon, which had dropped off with the rest of the Middle East, and “we’re also showing some more unusual places,” she notes, including Azerbaijan, Chad, and Zimbabwe.
The keys to the growth in student numbers, she says, are a welcoming atmosphere, a strategic plan, and collaboration. And it never hurts to have a student on the other end of a telephone or computer, ready to answer any questions that a student from another part of the world might have about AU.
