Mentoring International Students for Future Success

IELI enables students from around the world to pursue their dreams

By: Ekaterina Arshavskaya, LPCS/IELI

Despite the many challenges caused by the pandemic, we have all heard and shared stories of resilience, creativity and empathy during this time. One of such stories pertains to the successes of our international students here at USU. Over the past two years, I have mentored several international and immigrant students as a research mentor and would like to introduce them to the Liberalis readers through this article.

During last summer, I worked with Nefi Reyes, Elzat Halimulati, and Adama Traore as research assistants on a research project investigating how teachers learn to work with diverse student populations. Even though English is the students’ second language, they were persistent to master it during their earlier studies and saw this opportunity as a way to further improve their academic and research skills. In fact, this research project further supported Nefi’s interest in pursuing a graduate degree program, and he has been recently accepted to a Ph.D. program in the Notre-Dame University.

This summer, our project team will be extended to include Xandra Yunuen Camargo Gonzalez, a wonderful student from Mexico who plans to pursue an M.A. program in Psychology at USU. Before this, I mentored Xandra to present at the LPCS 2021 research symposium and to the best of my knowledge, she was the first IELI student to do this and she did it with great success.

I hope that these students’ stories can be inspiring and encouraging for all students of different backgrounds and beliefs coming to USU to pursue their big dreams.

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