Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Dana Bekurs: This podcast is produced by members of the University of Alabama Parent Advisory Council and reflects the personal views, experiences, and opinions of the hosts and guests. These views are independent and do not represent, reflect, or speak on behalf of the University of Alabama, its administration, faculty, staff, or affiliated organizations. The content shared is for general informational and conversational purposes only. It is not intended to provide academic, medical, legal, financial, or institutional advice. While we aim to share thoughtful and helpful perspectives, we make no guarantees regarding accuracy, completeness, or timeliness. Listeners are encouraged to verify information independently and rely on official University of Alabama communications for policies, decisions, and guidance. Listening to this podcast is voluntary and any actions taken based on the content are done at your own discretion and risk.
Welcome to Parent Perspectives. Navigating the University of Alabama experience as a parent can be exciting, overwhelming, and full of questions. And you don't have to do it alone. Parent Perspectives is a podcast by parents, for parents and with parents created to share real conversations, trusted insights, and firsthand experiences from those who've been there. Whether your student is Bama bound, settling into freshman year, or finding their stride on campus, this is your go to source for all things Bama student related. From academics in campus life, to traditions and the moments that matter most, we cover what parents want to know honestly and thoughtfully. Tune in and feel confident knowing you're part of a supportive Bama parent community.
[00:01:51] Kelly Kurburski: Welcome to the UA Parent Perspective Podcast. For many students, college is much more than earning a degree. It's about discovering who they are and expanding, expanding their view of the world. One of the most transformative opportunities available at the University of Alabama is education abroad. Many parents have questions about studying abroad, like is it affordable? Will it delay graduation? Is it safe? Today we're answering those questions and exploring how studying abroad can become one of the most impactful experiences of a student's college journey. But before we begin and to dive into today's conversation, let's meet our guest.
Carolina, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your role with education abroad at the University of Alabama?
[00:02:35] Dr. Carolina Love: Absolutely, Kelly. Thank you so much.
And I appreciate you all for allowing us to talk about my favorite topic. So again, my name is Carolina Love. I am the Director of Education Abroad. I have the privilege and honor of supporting UA students on international experiences that augment their degree here at ua. So I'll keep it short and sweet in terms of my introduction.
Great.
[00:03:05] Kelly Kurburski: Well, let's start with the question many parents ask first, why should a student consider studying abroad? Is it really worth the investment?
And can students from any major participate? Or is Education abroad primarily designed for language or international students studying those topics.
[00:03:23] Dr. Carolina Love: Absolutely. So is it worth the investment? Yes. Yes, Yes.
I truly believe that education abroad provides a transformative experience for our students.
Leaving this country, leaving their norms, and going out and navigating a new country or language, or leaving, traveling without their family for the first time really builds skills that you can't really build in the day to day classroom here in Tuscaloosa.
So I definitely believe that it is something that all students should do.
Any major can participate. It builds independence, it builds confidence. Every day isn't the best day abroad and that really builds grit and tenacity for our students. And these are all kind of skills that employers value. And it really does expand a student's understanding of the world.
[00:04:25] Kelly Kurburski: That's fabulous. One of the biggest misconceptions parents have is that studying abroad might delay graduation.
So how do students earn academic credit while studying abroad? How does education abroad work with academic advisors to ensure that students stay on track for graduation?
[00:04:42] Dr. Carolina Love: This is one of my favorite questions, because study abroad is a part of the degree plan, not separate from it. I always tell parents at BAMA boundaries, it's called study abroad first. So you've got to go and do the work and get the academic credit. Most of our students are doing that where they're aligning an experience abroad that's really tied to their academic degree. So for instance, we have students who are interested in biology and maybe marine biology, and they will do a study abroad program in the Turks and Caicos where they're up every night over just watching sea turtles and the sea turtle migration. They sleep during the day, but that's what they want to do.
That particular experience in the Turks and Caicos is really aligned to what they want to do in terms of their degree. And it's not something that we can really do. In Tuscaloosa, the academic credit is the center part of it.
When students do a larger experience. We have some students who are sitting abroad for an entire semester or even a full academic year. They have to get all of their courses pre approved before they leave Tuscaloosa, before they leave the United States, so that we know that the courses that they're going to take abroad are going to come back and fit their academic degree program to make sure that they are maintaining progress and this is not adding to their time at ua.
[00:06:12] Kelly Kurburski: Great.
Another concern families do have is cost.
Many families assume that studying abroad is financially out of their reach. Is that really the case? So what are affordable program options? Scholarships, financial Aid opportunities and funding resources are available for Alabama students.
[00:06:33] Dr. Carolina Love: I think cost is a myth that keeps a lot of people from coming into our office. But cost should be part of a planning conversation and really not. Not a barrier.
Any mechanism that is paying for a student to study on the Tuscaloosa campus usually applies on a study abroad because students are earning academic credit. So any kind of scholarship, federal financial aid, 529 plan, we have some programs that are specific for students who are on the GI Bill.
So all of those particular mechanisms will and can apply to specific study abroad programs.
I think what makes programs more affordable is the locations that students can choose.
[00:07:24] Kelly Kurburski: Right.
[00:07:25] Dr. Carolina Love: We do have students who are choosing some of the most expensive cities in the world. They're going to London. They might go to Sydney. Of course, the cost of attendance to those cities are larger because it's almost like going to school in New York or California. It is more expensive. However, students can get very similar experiences by choosing a different city in that particular region. So we have students who are going to Hull or Birmingham in the United Kingdom instead of London, maybe they're going to Brisbane instead of Sydney and Australia.
And that considerably changes the cost of, you know, rent or food or day to day living. So at the education abroad office, those are the kind of conversations that we have with students. Is making proper program choices and location choices really helps keeping costs more affordable.
Understanding how their current scholarships, financial aid, GI Bill applies, makes things more accessible. But also within our office, we have study abroad scholarships. So last year our office alone awarded over 300 study abroad scholarships throughout the university. We are also tied into some larger pots of money.
So one of the largest pots of money is through the United States State Department called the Gilman Scholarship. And this is for students who are in, who are Pell Grant students who have never really been abroad before. And that scholarship is up to $5,000 to do a study abroad experience, or an additional $3,000 if they want to add language. Right. Some kind of a critical language, maybe studying Arabic or Chinese. So we've had over in the past 10 years, 250 UA students won Gilman scholarships, almost to $700,000 of money awarded to our students. So that's one of our favorite things to kind of talk about is it cost is a part of the conversation. It should not be a barrier. Come on in and we'll help you build that, build your experience so that is accessible to everybody.
[00:09:32] Kelly Kurburski: Well, and that's great to know that there are financial resources available. So one question that I do Have. So, Siobhan, I'm going off script for a minute, but my question is, are there study abroad programs that are already built that you can go through and say, this is kind of what I want to do based on my major, or do all the students build that with their advisor or whomever?
Or is it a combination of both?
[00:10:00] Dr. Carolina Love: That's a really great question and unlike any question I've ever had before, actually. So study abroad programs are usually already built.
[00:10:10] Kelly Kurburski: So.
[00:10:11] Dr. Carolina Love: So the academic portion of it is built. The itinerary is planned with the faculty's expertise and then really involving the location. Right. The location is another teacher. We hope that every student goes abroad and doesn't sit in four walls in another country and not experience the city or town. Right. We have students who are literally in Florence, sitting under the David, drawing the David in art history. Right.
So we take the faculty's expertise, we build an itinerary around it. Most of the time, there's always housing included in that package. Excursions related to the academic piece, because all of the faculty have to meet the contact hours for the academic rigor for the course. Right. You have to be teaching related topics in order for it to count as that academic credit. We don't have students who are going to build their own experiences, but we do have programs where maybe a student directly enrolls in a foreign institution. So let's say we have a student who spends a semester at Oxford or London School of Economics or Hiroshima in Japan, and they're going to school there, but they get to choose where they live because there's different housing options. So maybe that's where their choice lives.
But not kind of a fully fledged. They're planning their own study abroad program.
[00:11:37] Kelly Kurburski: Okay, great.
That's fabulous.
[00:11:40] Dana Bekurs: Yeah.
[00:11:41] Kelly Kurburski: Once parents know that studying abroad is academically and financially possible, safety becomes their biggest concern.
How does the university evaluate study abroad programs and destinations to help ensure student safety? What happens if there's a medical emergency, a mental health concern, political unrest, or another unexpected situation while the student is overseas?
[00:12:04] Dr. Carolina Love: Student health safety. Well, being on our programs is our highest priority.
I can say this as a parent of a current college student who also said, mom, I'm studying abroad. And I said, what? You're going where? With who? And this is what I do every day. Right.
I can understand the excitement and sheer panic that comes when your child is saying, I want to go to another country. On the other side of the world.
There's a lot of things that UA does to prepare students and also prepare faculty. So all Students have to do do a pre departure orientation. We do them in person this year. We had 2,000 students go abroad this academic year and 97% of them came in person. There's some students who are currently abroad and kind of extending so they couldn't do their thing or they're on a co op. But we do kind of a two hour huge prep course about how do you prepare, how do you communicate in case of emergency, how do you use. We have kind of a International SOS is our insurance travel provider. So how do we, you know, communicate with international SOS in case of an emergency? What are the steps that you need to take? How do you manage culture?
Culture shock, Right. What are the differences in terms of what you should wear? Not necessarily how you pack, but how you dress may impact what you are, whether you're targeted or not. Right. So we have these pre departure orientations and then normally that's kind of general across the university.
Then within each program maybe a faculty will have a specific pre departure orientation as it relates to their program.
[00:13:52] Dana Bekurs: Right.
[00:13:52] Dr. Carolina Love: This is the itinerary. This is where we're staying in the hotel in case of emergency, in case of political unrest, things like that.
We also have, we're lucky to have one of the few institutions that has a full time associate director for International Health, Safety and Risk Management.
So he is, reports to me in the Education Abroad office. He supports faculty and staff at ua. But most of our international travelers are ua, our students. And so he is the first person to manage some of the crisis mitigation that happens. So political unrest, we've had that, the terrorist attacks that happens, earthquakes that happened this year. We had students in Guatemala that we had to reach out to because there was an earthquake in Central America in a neighboring country and we had to check in. But we also manage mental health cases.
And just most of the time to be kind of funny is that students are in and out of medical hospitals because either that they get sick or it's kind of GI issues, right There they go abroad, they go to Costa Rica. Costa Rica's main gastronomy is beans almost three times a day. And our Americans students aren't used to that much fiber. So they're like, oh, it's normally kind of stomach issues or those who get when we tell them don't eat street food and they get adventurous in India and it's like it's not was it the right thing to do.
So we are honestly there to kind of walk them through that particular process. And another thing that we do too is we prepare faculty who lead our program so they do a three hour risk and safety meeting before they run our programs. And hopefully this year we may have about 90 faculty led programs that are run by UA professors. We also do something that's very strange at UA is that we prepare our parents.
So during finals week we have a parent pre departure orientation because again, I am a parent of a college student who barely tells me anything and I work at the university.
So we say, hey parents, this is what we've told your students and this is how we navigate. And hey parents, this is how you're a great ally and this is how we build the students confidence to make good decisions and this is how we support them. And these are the mechanisms that.
And also something that's very strange is that we give every student and every parent my cell phone and our associate director of International risk cell phone so they have access to us 24 7, which is great.
[00:16:36] Kelly Kurburski: And that preparation is key. Right. For the student as well as the parents because that's where that safety and that comfort really comes in. So you've talked a little bit about preparation for the students before they leave.
What do you say to the parents whose student has never traveled before? I mean, we talked about the GI and some of the dietary things, but what are some of the. These are what you must know before your student does go abroad.
[00:17:06] Dr. Carolina Love: Yeah. You don't have to be an experienced traveler to be successful in studying abroad. And in fact, 40% of our students, so 700 of our students this, this year alone had never left the country and they did this experience.
So we try to tell them to be. And you said the word, a smart traveler. Right.
Be experienced, do some research, do homework, learning about the culture.
Our students back in the day, we would, you know, do Rick Steves travel guides. Now our students are finding it on YouTube and TikTok. And it's fine. I don't care where the information is. But you have to learn the city, learn, learn to navigate the culture and learn, learn that as much as you can to really gain some of that knowledge. We obviously have knowledge in our office as well. I mean, I alone have been to 45 different countries and so I can bring some tidbits and ideas and suggestions, but also know that the people who are supporting students are also going to be culturally preparing the students for their experience while they're on the ground and making sure logistics are kind of safe.
But we've had a student within, probably, I guess within five years of me starting this Role. We had a student we sent abroad who had never left the state of Alabama. So they were 18 years old and had never studied abroad before. So we love to kind of help students kind of get over that fear, because it is a true fear, and equip them with the tools and give them the power, because I promise you, they come back, change.
That's the best part of my job is to, to really see the transformation in these students. They come back, they look different, they walk with their shoulders back, There's a little bit more confidence. Like I said, every day wasn't great abroad, but they managed through it and they learned some new things.
They learned that a lot of Americans don't speak other languages. Where they go to Europe and they're meeting people who know four or five different languages, and then they get encouraged to do that.
So it really is transformational and it is totally doable for students who have never left the country.
[00:19:16] Kelly Kurburski: Well, that's a great first trip. It's to go international.
[00:19:19] Dr. Carolina Love: Yes, exactly.
[00:19:20] Kelly Kurburski: Outside Alabama.
[00:19:21] Dr. Carolina Love: Alabama. Can you imagine?
[00:19:23] Kelly Kurburski: Good for them. That's fabulous. So with so many opportunities available, choosing the right program can feel overwhelming. So we did touch base on this a little bit as far as what the university offers for education abroad programs. But how do they. How do students begin narrowing down their options and how far in advance do they need to plan? You have four years. So where in that four years does this fit in?
[00:19:48] Dr. Carolina Love: I would say that's one of the downfalls that we currently have on our website. We have 14 partners abroad. We have 90 faculty led programs, we've got 35 exchange partners. And if we were to take all of their opportunities together, we have thousands of opportunities at UA.
Normally we have students who are choosing between 60 to 65 different countries a year. So our students are everywhere. And if you start it on our website, it could be overwhelming because there's just so many things to look at and consider.
So I always say to students is start with their goals.
What do they personally want to? I ask every student, what's your vision of what your study abroad looks like?
And we start with the basic, is it hot? Is it cold? Are you speaking another language? Is it a big city? Is it a foreign city? Do you want to be with other Americans or people that you know or other UA students? Or do you want to be this lone student in a small country, you know, kind of isolated? And we do you have to. What's your time frame? Right.
You know, I have a lot of students saying, I'm studying abroad you know, my, my last semester and it, and you know, the program ends in June and it's, it's fine if I miss graduation. I said it might be fine for you, but it's fine for your parents to miss that graduation. So no, we're picking a new semester.
So we start with the students kind of goals and then we weave and bring in the academic advisors because they're the ones to say, okay, here, like here are the courses that you need to take maybe while abroad, or these are the, the degree path that you need to follow.
We might need to rearrange something. And so that kind of helps us get a window which makes it, you know, viable for the students. Then we talk to the parents and say, okay, like, you know, feasibly can financially, can this make sense? Or sometimes that conversation with the student.
We tend to say, if you start, if you're wanting to be abroad for six for the summer, start at least nine months ahead of time. If you want to be abroad first semester, start a year ahead of time. It takes some time. You have to get a passport, you have to get a visa, you have to apply to another university.
And so you students can make that process as stressful or a less stressful full as they want.
[00:22:07] Kelly Kurburski: Right.
[00:22:08] Dr. Carolina Love: And as many times as we tell students to start a year early, we still have students who come and will see us this October to say, hey, I want to be in Italy for the spring semester.
[00:22:18] Kelly Kurburski: And I'm like, okay, I do too. So how do I make it work? Right, right, right.
[00:22:25] Dr. Carolina Love: But I don't know if the Italian consulate has a spot for you for that visa appointment.
[00:22:29] Kelly Kurburski: So
[00:22:31] Dr. Carolina Love: we can talk to students when they first come to campus.
Even if they're going to study abroad a year or two in advance, we're just kind of preparing them to do so. And the first place to start is to come to our office. We're located in 144bb comer. We have a daily 101 session that is run that just kind of basically gives you the generic information.
And then we can start meeting with advisors from there.
[00:22:56] Kelly Kurburski: Okay, great. You've given us a lot of things to think through, a lot of helpful information for both parents and students, and wrapped up, you know, great, great messaging as well. So I want to thank you, Carolina, for helping us better understand the incredible opportunities education abroad provides for our University of Alabama students. Studying abroad isn't simply about visiting another country. It's about developing confidence, adaptability, cultural awareness, and life skills that stay with students for a long time. After they leave home to our listeners. Remember that education abroad is designed to be accessible, academically meaningful, and well supported. If your student has even the slightest interest in studying abroad, encourage them to start the conversation early. Like you heard Carolina say, it is that six to year long planning and what your goals are that will truly enhance this experience.
So there are resources, advisors and opportunities available to help every step of the way. Roll Tide.
[00:23:56] Dr. Carolina Love: Roll Tide. Thank you.
[00:23:59] Dana Bekurs: Thanks for tuning in today for the latest episode of Parent Perspectives, brought to you by the University of Alabama Parent Advisory Council. Check out all our podcasts on voices ua.edu. you can learn more about the Parent Advisory Council, Parent Perspectives, and UA Parent and Family Programs on the UA Parent and Family Programs website at Parenthood SL ua Eduardo.
