When you make a gift to the International Studies Program, you make it possible for our students to do great things. Your gift goes directly to student efforts and activities. Students can participate in a study abroad opportunity, internship, travel to conferences, develop International Studies Student Club projects, or perform student research.

Jon Herrboldt spent the 2006 fall semester in Paris. Jon received a State Department internship in the Bureau of European Affairs. Jon worked in the Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) department. He helped the OBO team in monitoring and reporting on the ongoing restoration of the George C. Marshall Center.

Our top priority is to have our students go abroad during their undergraduate career. When students study abroad their language facility increases dramatically and they gain the insights and perspective that can only be acquired by living in another country.

As a consequence of our work with a Department of Education grant, three internationally-renown scholars have been invited to UW during the 2006/2007 academic year: Dr. Wendy Doniger, a distinguished scholar of international religious studies, Dr. Asma Afsaruddin, an Islamic scholar from Notre Dame, and Dr. Alan Knight, an expert in Latin American politics from the University of Oxford.

Our goal in the next few years is to formalize the financing for these kinds of activities. Right now we must rely on grant funding to sponsor visiting scholars and students must seek outside scholarship monies to help with the cost of doing an internship or studying abroad. To that end, we have established two permanent funds that we hope to build over the next few years: the International Studies Speakers Series Fund and the International Studies Student Internship Fund. In addition, we are actively involved in the Arts and Sciences Study Abroad Scholarship Fund and many of our students have benefited from its scholarships.

If you would like to contribute to one of these funds, please contact me and we can discuss how this could be done, or you can peruse the UW Foundation website and explore alternative ways to give.

On behalf of all of us associated with the International Studies Program, I want to assure you that the donation will be put to good use. Thank you very much for your support of International Studies.

Jean Garrison, Director of the International Studies Program