Welcome Letter
A Note From Dean EdwardsWelcome to the Yale College Center for International Experience website! Each year hundreds of Yale students set out across the globe to experience other cultures through study, work, and research abroad. They have many goals and each student has a unique plan, but they share the understanding that thoughtful, well-planned time abroad can help them prepare for life in this age of globalization. We are committed here at Yale to supporting all undergraduates in planning their activities abroad, and in finding ways to finance these activities. We have established a Center for International Experience for this purpose, at 55 Whitney Avenue, where staff from Undergraduate Career Services, International Education and Fellowship Programs, and Yale Summer Session work together to make each student’s international experience worthwhile in every way. This website is the fruit of this new collaboration, and is designed to link many rich sources of information and bring them together in one place. We hope you find this new resource useful, and we welcome your visit to the Center. Jane Edwards *** |
A Note From Provost Salovey
Dear Yale students,
In choosing to study at Yale you opted for an education that is grounded in superb teaching and campus resources. But we believe that if you are to gain everything that you can from your Yale experience, you will reach beyond the local world of classrooms, residential colleges and playing fields, indeed beyond the diverse communities of the city of New Haven. We believe that a significant international experience is an essential component of education for the globalized world of the 21st century.
It is not just that your future employers, principal investigators, constituents, clients, and audiences will assume that you have the breadth of understanding and the cultural sensitivity to function effectively in complex professional environments. Your education should also help you build an interior life that is nourished and stimulated by cultural diversity, and not threatened by it. Such a life of the mind will be essential for you to feel at peace with the challenges that the contemporary world will surely present.
You can see detailed here the breadth and depth of the resources at Yale to help you construct your own experience abroad. In Yale College we have a commitment to provide international opportunities to fit the goals and interests of all our students. You may never have considered the idea of spending time abroad, feeling that this is something you are not ready for, or that it will be too expensive, or that it will be a distraction, or that this is only important for those studying foreign languages. Our advisers can help you see the value of challenging yourself to find an experience that is the perfect match for you – whether it is a field-based environmental studies program, an internship with an NGO, a summer dedicated to laboratory research at a world-class institution in another country, or any of the other conventional or extraordinary experiences Yale students design and embrace.
Whether you are one of the many Yale students who have had the opportunity to develop exceptional cross-cultural skills and who now seek to bring these together with your academic interests, or whether you haven’t the faintest idea how you might explore your options, the time to begin thinking about how to take advantage of all the international resources Yale has to offer is – now.
Peter Salovey
Provost, Yale University
