International Living and Learning Communities featured in higher ed publication

A SUNY New Paltz program that brings domestic and international students together in a living and learning community earned a feature story published by NAFSA: Association of International Educators, the world’s largest nonprofit association dedicated to international education and exchange.

In “Assessment 101: Measuring the Success of International Student Integration,” which appears in the Sept./Oct. 2016 issue of International Educator, reporter Dana Wilkie highlights the positive outcomes of New Paltz’s Romance Languages Living and Learning Community.

The program aims to help integrate international students into the campus community by pairing them in courses and in residence halls with U.S.-born students who are studying either the romantic languages or Latin American culture.

“We have had considerable success using living/learning communities to integrate international students,” said Center for International Programs Dean Bruce Sillner. “Programs like these allow our students and the College as a whole to capitalize on the natural synergy that occurs when students with an interest in other cultures spend time with peers from those cultures.”

Because many domestic students who participate in the communities plan to go on to study abroad themselves, the international living and learning communities play an important role in encouraging and highlighting student participation in study abroad. The communities support the College’s broader commitment to raising study abroad participation to 30 percent by 2020, as part of the Institute of International Education’s Generation Study Abroad Initiative.

Currently, about 22 percent of New Paltz students undertake a study abroad experience during their time at the College, among the highest figures in the SUNY system.

Students interested in applying for international study for the winter intercession, the spring and the calendar year must do so by Oct. 1, 2016.

For more information about study abroad and to apply, please visit the Center for International Programs online.

The Romance Languages program is one of two such living learning communities (there is also an East-West Community) that have grown out of a collaboration between the Center for International Programs, the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, the Asian Studies Program and the Office of Residence Life.

To learn more about living and learning communities that are open to all students, visit this page.