The Global University

The great journey from my family’s home in Tuckahoe, New York to Fordham University comprises all in all about a 20 minute trip (this of course is calculated without the varying factors of weather, traffic, my father speeding vs my mother’s driving etc), and it was actually the brevity of this trip that made me wary to come to Fordham University at all. These fears were alleviated when I actually became a student at Fordham and realized no security guards forced me to leave the campus so I would go home from dinner, but they were most definitely eradicated this past summer when I took an 18 hours plane flight JFK to South Africa-the vast distance I wanted to travel became a reality, only this time when I arrived back at Fordham I came back to my home in the global city.

When you go on college tours, they will usually try to sum up the character of a school in a few short phrases. For Fordham these factors are: New York, Jesuit, University. The combination of these characteristics necessitates that the people and programs the school runs will also be “one-of a kind,” and study abroad is one such endeavor. The mission statement, like New York, moves-quickly, and to me the mission statement looks a lot like an economics professor named Dr. Booi Themeli who cares that you do as well in statistics, as much as he cares about soccer, and as greatly as he feels motivated to send and mentor students from South Africa to the Bronx and from the Bronx to South Africa. I spent this past August in South Africa, where I participated with other Fordham students in a Fordham run economics course called “Emerging Markets of Developing Nations.” The experience truly altered and deeply affected my outlook and perception of the world, yet the greatest component of the trip includes the friendships I have made with university students in South Africa. I never felt removed from the students or at a distance from the cities we stayed in; we were as much a part of the country as the students who lived there and this feeling is a testament to Fordham’s extreme focus on “not going through the motions” but authentic immersion with the genuine and truce engagement with the real.

I believe so strongly in Fordham’s endeavor in South Africa that I will be returning there for the Spring Semester. We will be the first group of students who will spend the semester there as a part of a “service learning” program where we’ll work with a children’s school and a woman’s shelter to see how the problems in South Africa may be overcome. I will also have a unique opportunity to continue the internship I have now, which is with a microfinance institution called “Shared Interest.” Once in South Africa, I will be able to help with some of the field work for the partner’s organization and actually see where the loans are being put to action. I truly think Fordham is really in unique position to truly facilitate the kind of exchange programs we need in a global world and I also believe we are at the forefront of developing what study abroad programs in universities all over the country will one day look like. I am so incredibly excited to return to South Africa. So stay tuned and they’ll be more stories to come!