Like many of my fellow bloggers, my time abroad is coming to a close. And as a result, I’ve found myself questioning if I’ve made the most of my time here because as we so often hear, studying abroad really is a once (or twice if you’re lucky) in a lifetime opportunity.

The UI is one of many schools around the nation experiencing a drop in the number of new foreign students — and the negative effects are taking shape.

Peking University is ranked, along with Tsinghua University, among China’s premier institutions for higher education. The rigorous college entrance exam is the determining factor for students aspiring to enter the school’s rigorous academic environment. With that said, the Chinese education system is vastly different from American and Western education apparatuses. I am not fully matriculated at Peking University. Instead, I am enrolled in the School of Foreign Languages, which educates numerous international students that arrive in Beijing with varying language proficiencies.

Study abroad… have you heard about it? It changes your life. Yeah, I’m sure you have heard that one before. The thing is it's true, travel does something to you.

What we English speakers call sea lions Spanish speakers call lobos marinos. Lobo means wolf. For the last couple of days I’ve been unsuccessfully trying to rationalize this in my sunburnt head. When they first saw those chubby mustachioed sea beasts, how did they settle on wolf? In all fairness they don’t really look like lions either. If it were up to me I’d officially change their name to sea bears, or better yet sea puppy dogs.

2017 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Russian revolution. That tumultuous century saw Russia reject the Romanov dynasty which had ruled for over three hundred years and embrace a new ideology whose leader, Vladimir Lenin, would become the head of the world’s first communist state.  The world watched as the Soviet Union re-created a Russian-dominated empire, lost millions of lives to purges and terror,  withstood the onslaught of Nazi Germany, faced off against the West during the Cold War, then dissolved, with Russia re-emerging under Vladimir Putin as a central player in global power politics. 

Contemporary African artist Eric Adjetey Anang, internationally renowned for the Ghanaian ‘fantasy coffins’ he and generations before him have created, has spent the fall 2017 semester as artist-in-residence at the UI Museum of Art. He will join UI faculty and African art scholars on the December 7 WorldCanvass in a program called “Art & the Afterlife.” WorldCanvass will take place from 5:30-7 p.m. at MERGE, 136 South Dubuque Street. The program is free and open to the public. Please come early for a pre-show catered reception from 5-5:30 p.m.

The number of newly arriving international students declined an average 7 percent in fall 2017, with 45 percent of campuses reporting drops in new international enrollment, according to a survey of nearly 500 campuses across the country by the Institute of International Education.

University of Iowa students abroad, international students at UI will be recognized during International Education Week

Ah, studying abroad. I’d often dreamt of what my experience studying abroad would be like—although, ironically, my dreams always lacked any of the actual studying part. I really didn’t spend too much time fantasizing about what classes would be like in a foreign country; I think part of me must have assumed that business courses are the same everywhere. And generally speaking, we do learn the same things: financial and managerial accounting, basic economics, statistics, etc. However, the way in which courses are structured and taught is a bit different.