ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA—Winthrop University will partner with the GEIST Foundation to recruit more students internationally.
The GEIST Foundation/Winthrop University Partnership of Global Excellence’s goal is to bring the first cohort of top students to Winthrop in Fall 2020. While the cohort will begin small, Vice President for Access and Enrollment Management Eduardo Prieto hopes to build the program over the years.
“We feel like Winthrop is a strong and competitive option as well as a great fit for the students at GEIST Foundation partner schools,” Prieto said. “We also see this partnership as a mutual benefit to provide an opportunity for our domestic students to interact and learn about other cultures and in turn for international students to live and learn from our students.”
An international organization that focuses on education improvements, the GEIST Foundation represents a network of nearly 300 teachers in 14 countries, including Bangladesh, Vietnam, Ukraine, Nepal and Thailand. It was organized by teachers who came to the United States on U.S. State Department-supported exchange programs like the Teaching Excellence and Achievement (TEA) program.
GEIST President and CEO Biplob Khumar Deb and Shahed Mohammed Ali, a TEA Fellow who spent a semester at Winthrop and now serves as GEIST brand ambassador and chief information officer, met with university leadership in May to discuss the partnership.
Marshall Jones, education professor and program director for the new masters in Learning Design and Technology, has served as an international advisor for the foundation for the past two years and spoke at its conference.
Many students have expressed interest in studying at Winthrop, he said.
“For many students in developing countries, studying in the U.S. is very important,” Jones said. “If you have a U.S. degree, it opens doors for you in your home country in many ways. Your language skills qualify you for work in organizations that may do work internationally. One of the thing that appeals to so many of these students is that their teachers came to Winthrop and studied with us during the TEA program. We have TEA alumni in many of the partner countries - Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia, Ukraine, to name just a handful.”
The opportunities are significant, he added.
“We’re looking to use our partnership with the GEIST Foundation to recruit international students, but we’re also looking at collaborative research and professional development opportunities for our new partners and for our faculty, staff and students.”
In August, Jones will travel to Hanoi to keynote the foundation’s conference, “International Conference on STEAM 2019: ICS 2019.”
“Attendance at this conference at this point in our partnership should enable us to strengthen our new partnership with GEIST,” he said. “I’m looking forward to talking to teachers and students about Winthrop University. I know they will be pleased with what they hear.”
To learn more about the GEIST Foundation, visit http://geistfoundation.org.
For more information about Winthrop’s partnership with the GEIST Foundation, contact Marshall Jones at 803/323-2487 or jonesmg@winthrop.edu.
For more information about applying to Winthrop University as an international undergraduate student contact Ani Subotic at 803/323-4773 or subotica@winthrop.edu.
