“Dude, you’re a senior. Why are you studying abroad?” Okay, I haven’t actually been asked this question by another human being, but I have contemplated it on numerous occasions. Now, have I answered this question to myself? Yes. Yes I have.

I've studied Arabic for three years. I can write papers, discuss ideas, give presentations, and I can't even ask a taxi driver what the fare is in Morocco. Or I couldn't yesterday morning, when my fellow international student and I took a taxi with four other people (two in the front seat, four squeezed in the back) to the city of Meknès, about an hour away from campus, for the day. We were lucky– there happened to be someone else in the taxi who spoke English.

Harry Leeds had expected students to be shy about writing poetry in English, the way any student might be nervous about writing and sharing personal work in a second language. When it came to the 20 Kazakh students in his poetry workshop, however, he was wrong: “Some people didn’t want to share with the group,” Leeds says, “but everyone wrote.”

Yesterday morning, bright and far too early, I and about forty other students and staff set out for Zaouia Sidi Abd es-Salaam, a nine-kilometer hike through the forest from Al Akhawayn University's campus. Organized by the Interfaith Alliance, the goal of our hike was to see the zaouia, a shrine built over the mausoleum of a famous Moroccan holy man Sidi Abd es-Salaam, and see the limestone caves for which the city of Ifrane was named (in the local Berber dialect).

Introducing the ISSS International Parent of the Year runners up for 2015, Ms. Ying Pan and her sister Ms. Hong Pan of China.

From the intimate to the ordinary, life in this Midwestern college town is changing. The iconic Hamburg Inn, the diner where presidential candidates have stumped for decades, still dishes up its famous "pie shakes." But take a closer look: Bubble tea shops outnumber Starbucks 3 to 1, and nearly 1 in 10 students at the University of Iowa hails from China.

Introducing the ISSS International Parent of the Year winners for 2015, Mr. Hameed Nada Hammad and Mrs. Lameeah Bunyan Jabal of Iraq.

Get to know International Student and Scholar Services advisor Brandon Paulson!

An introduction to University Counseling Services and the support they offer for your student.

This summer, Meena Khandelwal was awarded over $83,000 by the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Program to lead a group of UI students and faculty to India to investigate the curious case of the chulha- a wood fueled cook-stove- used in rural areas across India. Often cited as a cause of deforestation and pollution, efforts to replace them with solar cookers have been widespread but largely unsuccessful. This project will bring together UI engineers, anthropologists, urban planners, and historians to examine chulhas from every dimension: what has motivated efforts to improve them, what interventions have occurred, and why have these efforts tended to fail.