As a seven-year-old, MIT senior and classical guitarist Nicki Lehrer was a street musician in Georgetown (while Dad watched from across the street). At 11, she patented a book-carrying device for school children called The Gripper. But it is her undergraduate experience with helping, and providing hope for, street children in one of the poorest regions of Ecuador that she says has really changed her life.

“To understand another culture, where people's lives are so different from our own, is amazing,” she says. “I mean, the people down there have next to nothing. But they are the happiest people I’ve ever known. In Ecuador, it's so refreshing to be put into a situation that from the outside appears so dire, and yet from the inside shows so much life and passion.”

Lehrer — who has since founded the non-profit Children of Guayaquil — originally took a semester off from MIT to journey to Ecuador. Now, she travels there during IAP and summer months with help from the MIT International Development Initiative.

An international experience for every undergraduate

As the world becomes smaller and boundaries blur, as it becomes clearer by the day that MIT graduates need to understand and be able to work with people from diverse countries and cultures, a new global focus has emerged. In fact, it is now an Institute goal to ensure that all undergraduate students have a chance to work, study, or travel abroad at some point during their four years at MIT, without financial or academic penalty.

Undergraduate opportunities for international activity at MIT fall into three major categories. The examples given below are considered some of the “quintessentially MIT” models that now need to be expanded.

• Foreign study and educational exchanges: The Cambridge-MIT Exchange (CME), the most visible MIT-sponsored study abroad program, provides MIT and Cambridge University undergraduates the chance to swap places as fully matriculated scholars for the academic year.
• Internships: The biggest and most established international internship program is MISTI (MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives) — the Institute’s alternative to a traditional junior year abroad. MISTI sends MIT students to hands-on internships in one of nine countries, where they work in companies, research labs, or universities. The internships take place within a rigorous curricular framework.
• International Development activities: IDI (International Development Initiative), a joint program of the Edgerton Center and the Public Service Center, amplifies the efforts of both with a collection of activities that includes D-Lab, the IDEAS Competition, international UROPs ("IROPs"), and international humanitarian engineering projects invented by faculty and/or students themselves.

Of IDI’s faculty-led initiatives, J. Kim Vandiver, professor of mechanical engineering and dean for undergraduate research, says, “We don’t have a pot of funds that can match the interest in that right now. We have faculty who would love to do it, and we want to be able to make it happen. Putting a faculty member out in the field with students is one of the most powerful things we can do.”

A classic win-win

In addition to how the world benefits from dispersing MIT undergraduates around the globe is the advantage to the students themselves.

Senior Matt Zedler came to MIT from Richmond, Virginia, and thought he was having an international experience just living in his freshman residence. Then, sophomore year, he went to Lesotho, Africa, to work on D-Lab’s solar parabolic trough project, followed by junior year in England through the Cambridge-MIT Exchange. He has also worked in Sri Lanka through Engineers Without Borders. To say that his life has been changed is an understatement.

“I came to MIT thinking I’d get a mechanical engineering degree, take a good job at a big-deal U.S. company, then do a little ‘suburban picket fence home with wife and three kids’ kind of thing,” Zedler says. “But now I want to use engineering to make a difference in the lives of people abroad who don’t have access to electricity and other energy resources like we do in the U.S.”

"That’s part of the magic of these experiences,” explains Elizabeth Reed, senior associate dean in the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Education. “Our students want to find their purpose in the world, and they don’t always discover it in the classroom or the lab. When they are able to go out and have these sorts of experiences, sometimes the connection to academic learning becomes clear, and it can turn into a career.”

The road ahead

A new report from the 15-member Global Experience Opportunities at MIT Committee (GEOMIT) calls the Institute’s innovative international programs not only successful in pilot phase, but also “enviable.” Its recommendations going forward:

• expand existing international programs;
• develop new ones, particularly faculty-led initiatives;
• find more ways to integrate global education into the curriculum; and
• establish an Office of Global Education to act as coordinating body and advocate for the global education initiative Institute-wide.

GEOMIT recommends that international opportunities for undergraduates increase from about 300 per year presently, to 600 per year by the 2008-2009 academic year, to 1,200 per year at the end of five years.