International Programs created a video message featuring University of Iowa alumni across the globe to celebrate Hawkeye unity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sylvia Dean (BA linguistics/TESL '20) was the winner of a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award to Taiwan for 2019-20. While the coronavirus pandemic cut her Fulbright experience short, she has fond memories of her experience.

Aviral recalls the first three months at the UI as an exciting time, but not without its challenges. Beyond learning how to balance studies, he found himself struggling to make social connections. “Initially, I think I was trying to be someone I wasn’t in order to fit in. It was pretty stressful and really tiring. I finally decided to quit worrying about how to act and just be me. This is when everything started to change.”

Finishing her second year as a microbiology major at the University of Iowa, Ayushi Sood says she couldn’t have asked for a better experience. “I have grown so much as a person since I have been at Iowa,” said Sood. “As an international student, my experience has been that people are so welcoming here, which makes me feel that I am an essential part of the university.”

Following in the footsteps of her mother, a University of Iowa PhD alumna, Siau-Tong Ding enrolled as an undergraduate in 2018. Born and raised in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, Ding came to Iowa City to double-major in environmental policy and planning and anthropology. Now, in preparation for her third year at the university, she is also considering minors in geography or a certificate in Geographic Information Science (GIS).

Would you like to study abroad during your time at the University of Iowa, but don't know where to start? Attend our weekly Discover Study Abroad info sessions to learn how study abroad works and find the right international opportunity for you!  

Students, adults, and children of any language level are invited to sign up for a variety of virtual classes with the UI King Sejong Institute during the summer 2020 semester.

Administrators have had practice leading through crises before, and it helped them come together to respond to COVID-19 as a team.

Sojeong Nam is a PhD candidate in the counselor education and supervision program at the University of Iowa. The inspiration to attend the UI may have come from her father, Dr. Sangin Nam, who, over 30 years earlier, graduated from the same doctoral program at the UI, holding the distinction of being the first international student from South Korea to do so.

Yuchen Liu, a fourth-year Ph.D. student originally from Nanjing, China, joined the University of Iowa’s teaching and learning (foreign language and ESL education) graduate program through the College of Education in hopes of broadening and enhancing her language acquisition and teaching skills.