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Saturday, September 19, 2009
All Minnesota college and university students returning from a sojourn abroad are invited to attend the third annual MN Re-entry Conference. The 2009 conference will be hosted by Augsburg College and is a partnership between a dozen institutions from across the state.
The conference begins at 9AM with registration and a continental breakfast. Join over 150 students from around the state who have just spent part of their academic career abroad. A full day of activities is planned to help bring your study abroad experience full circle.
Keynote speaker, Jenn Bottke, Gustavus alum, nurse and author will inspire us with her tales from abroad.
Jenn was a typical college student in 2001, floating through her freshman year at Gustavus Adolphus College when study abroad found her. She spent a semster in India, and returned home with a new outlook on life. Jenn finished her degree in Nursing, and is working as a Registered Nurse in a small community hospital. While on bedrest with her second pregnancy, Jenn was so bored that she decided to write her study abroad adventure into a book, entitled "Barefoot in the Kitchen". It was published last year. Study abroad changes lives and Jenn is a walking example of it's power to transfom.
A student panel comprised of 2008 conference participants will address the topic of study abroad as a privilege and the challenge it is to become a Global Citizen. Small group table talk will allow for discussion and debate from conference participants.
Lunch is included with your conference registration.
Students will choose to attend three rotating sessions from the seven on offer.
The day will wrap-up at 3:30PM with door prize drawings.
View the 2009 Conference Brochure!
Registration is now available through a secure, on-line site. Please note that you will have to pay the $10 Conference Registration Fee at the time of application. The fee will be charged to all participants attending the conference to help cover the costs of meals.
Please check with your home college or university as the study abroad office may provide transportation to the conference and/or reimbursement of the registration fee.
The registration fee is not meant to prohibit anyone from attending the conference. Sponsorship is available to students with financial need. Please contact pretka@csbsju.edu for more details.
Cancellation Policy: Refunds for the $10 registration fee will be granted if notice of cancellation is sent to pretka@csbsju.edu by Friday, September 11. No refunds will be given after this point.
The second annual re-entry conference was held on Saturday, September 27, 2008 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. This event brought together resources from across Minnesota to provide support to recently returned study abroad students. One-hundred twenty-three students attended, representing 12 institutions. Thirty volunteers from across the state helped to make this day a reality.
Students shared their stories from study abroad experiences; discussed their transition back to student life in Minnesota; attended rotating sessions on international careers, volunteering locally and internationally, working and interning abroad, effective story telling, travel writing, and resume critiques; participants won great door prizes and listened to impactful speakers.
Meredith McQuaid, Associate Vice President & Dean of the Office for International Programs at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, opened the conference and welcomed all to the campus.
Amanda Saum, a student from the College of Saint Catherine shared her perspective as a study abroad participant in Chile and Mexico.
Sitting on the plane, I found myself simultaneously more terrified and more excited than I had maybe ever been, a feeling perhaps some or many of you can relate to. As I embarked on an adventure, and it truly was a complete and total adventure, where I would take all of my classes in Spanish, live with a Chilean family, really and truly get culture shocked, and make some of the best friends of my life, I didn’t understand how much I would be impacted and later obsessed with the study of culture, people, and language.
My time abroad changed my perspective on my life, my country and culture, and what it means to be educated. It engaged my passion for Spanish and gave me a love of far-away places that I never knew I’d have.
Since returning from my study abroad experiences I have found myself with what I feel to be a new identity, a greater ability to embrace the unknown, a profound appreciation and value of culture, and a great comfort in my language skills that I never thought I’d have. I wouldn’t say that, by any means, I became fluent through my time in Spanish-speaking countries, but I know for a fact that the skills and experience I gained there propelled me to the level I’m at (probably more so than I have realized) and inspired me to involve myself with the Latino population here in my home country and home city.
The 2008 keynote speaker was Kerala Taylor, Editor in Chief of National Geographic Glimpse; a publication about real life abroad. Its stories focus on personal experiences, with the larger goal of promoting cross-cultural understanding. Their contributors immerse themselves in a foreign culture and share their stories, helping you to see the world in a new way.
Kerala's remarks were grounded in her own international experiences in Australia, Fiji, Ghana, Indonesia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and all over Europe. In addition, her own study abroad expereince in Bolivia informed her worldview and helped with the creation of Glimpse. Kerala contends that Glimpse can play an important role in the media to inform Americans, US college students in particular, about the day-to-day in other countries.
Amazingly, at its most basic form, the human experience is remarkably similar no matter where you live: you wake up, you go to work or school, you spend time with family and friends, you eat, you sleep. By honing in on these smaller details, we wanted to remind people that hey, maybe what we think of as “foreign” isn’t really so foreign after all. But at the same time, we wanted to draw attention to those details and nuances that make cultures so compelling, so confusing, and so stunningly diverse.
It’s such a cliché to say that study abroad is a life-changing experience... But the fact is, it’s nearly impossible to immerse yourself in another culture for an extended period of time and come back home unchanged. Sure, there are superficial differences—maybe you prefer tea to coffee now, or you’ve gained an appreciation for hip-hop, or you’ve started wearing scarves. But on a deeper level, an entire portion of the world, which was once distant and two-dimensional, has now been humanized, brought to life. From now on, whenever you hear your host country mentioned, whether it’s on the news or during a lunchtime conversation, you will inevitably perk up, because now you care.
Contact the study abroad office at your home school for more details about re-entry activities taking place on your campus.
Conference brochure and agenda - 2008
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