Jillian Manternach is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Public Policy and Leadership with a minor in Middle Eastern Language and Culture. After studying abroad in Meknes, Morocco during Summer 2023 and again in Amman, Jordan during J-Term 2024, she decided to join the Education Abroad team as a student intern to encourage other students to have eye-opening global experiences like hers. UVA Global caught up with her to talk about her adventures abroad, the impact on her understanding of her studies, and her advice for other students interested in the global.

The 2024-25 academic year is shaping up to be UVA’s biggest year yet for undergraduate study abroad opportunities, with significant new financial aid that will enable hundreds of students to participate in dozens of previously inaccessible programs across multiple disciplines around the globe.

Hang Nguyen is a third-year PhD student in Statistics and a former Citizen Leader Fellow (2022-2023). For her Citizen Leader Fellowship project, she set out to understand the disproportionate number of Honor reports among international students and conducted a year-long ethnographic study on international students’ perceptions of academic integrity. This project paved the way to her ongoing advocacy and involvement in Honor. She is originally from Vietnam and went to high school and college in North Carolina.

This summer, students embarked on a variety of Education Abroad programs, both established and newly introduced, that challenged them to explore the real-world impact of their studies within diverse cultural contexts. Immersed in these unique environments, they gained fresh perspectives that enriched their academic and personal growth.

On August 4, 2024, the shadow of Pluto swept across the Earth cast by a star 500 times fainter than the eye can detect. As it happened, UVA Astronomy professor Michael Skrutskie staffed a brand new a new 0.5-meter Hubble Optics telescope in the middle of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Skrutskie was part of a six-person team, which also included four UWC faculty and students and fellow UVA Professor Anne Verbiscer. The team had spent about a week in Cape Town setting up the telescope, donated by UVA to UWC, before heading 500 miles north to view the occultation.

Professors Tessa Farmer (Anthropology, Global Studies) and Phoebe Crisman (Architecture, Global Studies) spent the summer in Egypt where they worked on the collaborative research project “Water Reuse, Urban Agriculture, and Heritage Preservation in Cairo's al-Khalifa Neighborhood” in collaboration with Cairo-based Athar Lina Initiative. They spoke with UVA Global about how sustainability and cultural heritage preservation intertwine in this project and why the co-design process is essential to these goals.