SEAS students aim to study abroad

The idea of studying abroad piqued the interest of Gunnar Aasen, SEAS ’10. But he soon found that leaving Morningside Heights was unfeasible.

“I would have liked to, but it was too late by the time I started looking into it my sophomore year,” Aasen said. “There was no way I could fit it in with the requirements I still had to fulfill.”

Because of experiences like Aasen’s, the number of SEAS students studying abroad rarely exceeds a handful. Due to efforts to change the current, including lobbying by Aasen, the trend may soon be reversed. Following a combination of student pressure and general interest in expanding study abroad opportunities, SEAS and University officials have begun helping students who do not want to be stuck in Mudd.

At the beginning of this semester, Regine Lambrech, formerly the head of international relations departments at universities in the U.S. and France, became the first SEAS director of global initiatives and education, months after SEAS Vice Dean Morton Friedman created the position.

“The University realized it was extremely important to highlight all types of educational offerings,” said Lambrech, who was officially hired in the fall of 2008. “I will reach out to students. I want to let them know that space exists in their curriculum. I really want to see engineering students go abroad.”

Before the deans commissioned a task force last year to explore how to improve SEAS study abroad opportunities, students and faculty had long debated how to expand the school’s international reach. The number of students spending a semester at foreign universities is generally low—only four students are currently abroad—because synchronizing engineering curricula between colleges in different countries is a laborious process.

“The fundamental difference is that the engineering school has the more rigid curriculum,” said Derrick Fu, SEAS ’12 and first-year class president. “While you can study philosophy at any university in the world, it is very difficult finding financial engineering courses at other universities.”

In order to satisfy the credit requirements mandated by the national Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, professors and students must ensure that a foreign university provides truly equivalent courses, which requires extensive research and communication that many professors find prohibitive. The few students who manage to go abroad usually choose the University College-London, a longtime partner university of SEAS. This institution is popular because engineering students, who do not have a foreign language requirement, generally prefer an English-language study abroad program.

Lambrech “is working with each individual department and looking at close equivalencies,” said Kathleen McDermott, the University’s assistant vice president for global programs. “Will you be able to get in step when you come back from abroad? Regine is trying to answer that question by enhancing the work that individual faculty do.”

Student leaders have also helped to prioritize this issue, and Aasen raised his concerns during meetings with administrators last year.
“We really brought this issue to the light and they responded,” Aasen said. “We are trying to make it [studying abroad] more accessible. We were further encouraged when we found the administration was open to taking our suggestions and were serious about making improvements.”

McDermott said it is “still too early to tell” whether the international recession will impact the number of engineers studying abroad over the next few semesters. But Lambrech argued that students may see living in a foreign country, especially one where the cost of living is lower than in New York, as a good economic option.

So far, the economy does not seem to be affecting the volume of Columbia students studying abroad. According to Lambrech, McDermott, and Assistant Director of Global Programs Karin Bonello, the number of students registered for summer and fall 2009 programs is in line with the numbers from previous years.

“I think the state of the economy is going to have a minimal effect on the number of students studying abroad next year,” said Aasen. He added that Columbia “gets a nice deal” out of students going abroad, because students who study abroad pay full Columbia tuition, even though foreign universities are often less expensive than Columbia. But when plane tickets and other costs are included, students essentially pay the same amount for international studies as they would for a Columbia education.
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