Robin Lee, associate director of the Career Development Center at Cal State Long Beach, will go to Germany this October after being received into the Fulbright International Education Administrators program in June.
The Fulbright program is government-funded and is the United State’s largest international exchange program. The International Education Administrators program is a specific Fulbright program that is for people who work in the field of student affairs.
“[It’s] like a student exchange but on an administration level,” Lee said. Lee’s involvement with CSULB’s International Education Committee is what originally got her interested in having an international experience.
Lee said her focus while abroad will be to learn about new orientation and retention practices for freshmen students by observing similar goal-oriented programs in Germany and meeting fellow Fulbright scholars. However, Germany’s university system recently lacks success in retaining their students, Lee said.
Germany’s response to this problem has made it an interesting case for Lee to study from. “They’ve been instituting a lot of efforts in the last decade to try to help these students be more attached [to their universities],” Lee said. Lee is planning on learning from German administrators which techniques they use to improve retention rates and from German first- and second-year students to understand their motivations for returning or not returning their sophomore year, leading to why students drop-out of college.
Germany will also have the chance to learn from Lee about U.S. orientation and retention practices. “So, in a sense, while I can be learning from higher education people in Germany and learning about the students in Germany, they’re also going to want to be learning about what we do here in the United States,” Lee said.
Lee said she has been interested in the Fulbright program for several years because of its various programs and famous scholars – some of whom have gone on to win Noble Prizes and other awards after their involvement in the program.
“I had heard about the Fulbright but I never would have known that there was a program that I could actually qualify for in the Fulbright,” Lee said. “And this is a particular program (International Education Administrators) that really targets administrators in universities in this country.”