Grabbed my briefcase, checked the full-length mirror. Yup, got my badge. Opened the hotel room door dashing to get to the AIRC conference networking breakfast buffet. Eyeroll and back into the room. Forgot to brush my teeth.
Conferencing tip for my colleagues: If, in your morning rush, you forget to brush your teeth, remove your conference badge and lanyard before you brush. The physics of the lanyard and badge during the lean over sink, rinse and spit process…well, you can imagine.
Opportunities to Meet the Intead Team
- AIEA in March, ASU+GSV in April, and NAFSA in May. We'll be presenting our latest findings with colleagues at AIEA and NAFSA. Let us know if you want to connect at either of those two events.
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The AIRC 2024 Conference produced exactly what it was supposed to produce at the end of a pretty arduous year. It’s all about the people in the room, their knowledge and expertise, and the culture of the gathering. AIRC achieves all of the right elements, repeatedly. The information we gathered will help us perform better in 2025 and beyond.
The Intead team showed up in force. We presented our daylong Global Marketing Workshop as well as conference sessions focused on budgeting for international student recruitment and an approach to streamlining admissions processes to improve the overall intake. All very practical stuff.
Institutions so often fail to calculate the full cost of IEM, leaving their international recruitment teams to a minimalist (at best) budget. An increasingly important consideration as demand for an international education grows in the coming years: How will changing student purchasing power influence your messaging? Can you reduce students’ total cost for a degree?
Read on to download our AIRC presentations.
Our favorite part of the conference, the international student voices panel, always gets us thinking. A surprising number of the comments from this year’s student panel focused on how just about everything they faced made them anxious. They talked about how surprised they were by the challenges that emerged for them while studying in another country.
A tangible takeaway for your international student services team: Despite your effort to produce wonderful pre-departure and arrival orientations, your info (slides, handouts, other materials) -- all largely lost on your audience.
Between the anxiety of the trip planning, the trip itself, the English language skills, and the lack of sleep, a significant portion of them are not retaining much of anything you share. Best case outcome of your effort is they click with another international student and have a buddy to help them through the early days of their rocky acclimation.
Another takeaway for everyone on your recruitment and student services teams: the work you are doing is vitally important even if your international students feel overwhelmed. They signed up for this. They are here to learn about international study and work. Adjusting to new cultures, new environments, new rules, new challenges. All of this happens more outside the classroom than in it. Your team is vital to helping the students access the entire experience.
Ultimately, they will figure it out. They will reach the goals they set for themselves. Hopefully, you can help them stretch those goals a bit. Make the process just hard enough that they succeed with pride of real accomplishment.
Important overarching approach to your work: being a place of stability and support in what will be a very trying, chaotic time for your students.
Another valuable point in the conference was a brief keynote by Applied Linguist Dr. Hanna Nicol. She spoke about cultural agility, which emerges or is learned through curiosity, humility, courage, and adaptability.
Dr. Hanna emphasized the notion of modesty across cultures – all toward the goal of building trust that bonds us together despite differences. THIS is the stuff that our international students are gaining both inside and outside the classroom. AND importantly, this is the stuff that astute domestic students are gaining because international students are part of the learning environment.
We look forward to another year by your side, figuring out the approaches, policies, processes, tech tools, finances, and professional connections that will produce the results we want. Beyond the all-important enrollment numbers, we must deliver the educational environment that produces results for the students making the investment of sweat and money.
With that in mind, the Intead team will be continuing our focus and counsel on three key areas that we believe will truly move the needle in the years ahead. None of these are easy:
- Researching international student career outcomes
- Identifying enrollment management structures that perform
- Supporting our clients who are developing new academic programs that are accessible to the growing number of international students with less purchasing power
Let us know if any of these topics are important to you. Our team is here to help.
Access our AIRC Conference 2024 slides 
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