University Without Borders

By: The Caravan

With reporting by Alya Hesham

It’s not unusual for students from all over the world to come to AUC to enrich their academic and cultural experiences; this has been part of the university’s global appeal for a century. This semester, however, the number of international students at AUC has boomed. According to the International Programs and Services Office (IPSO), the numbers of incoming exchange students have increased to 172 after being quite stagnant at an average of 82 the last four semesters. Senior Director of IPSO Dahlia El Tayeb says that the numbers of ex-change students at AUC decreased during the pandemic, but that these have been swiftly picking up again.

“AUC’s visibility has remarkably improved. We have been working very hard to market semesters abroad with our partners, ” said El Tayeb. She pointed out that political tribulations in the region, such as the Arab Spring in 2011, also had a visible negative effect on the number of incoming international students, which is why AUC is currently making a noticeable effort to recover from such crises. “Every semester we send to all our partners – we have 227 partners – our marketing materials and our flyers. We join webinars with interested students. We try to make the life in Egypt for international students easier,” El Tayeb said.

The demographic of exchange students at AUC has also changed. Recently, 70 percent of incoming students have been from European countries, while the remaining 30 percent are from the US and Asia.

Hope Hotchkiss, a mechanical engineering student from the US, told The Caravan that she sees it is an opportune time to come to Egypt and AUC. “I think partially with the world mostly getting over Covid this is a good timing,” Hotchkiss said.

She believes that the 2011 revolution was a factor that previously prevented students from the US to come to Egypt.
“Everything kind of died down at the same time and opened doors a lot wider,” she said.

Lucia Oppermann, a senior exchange student from Germany studying crisis management, said that she chose to come to AUC because she had always wanted to travel and experience a different lifestyle.

“Four months are short enough to not start a new life, but long enough to experience more of other cultures and other ways of thinking. I think it just really broadens your horizon,” Oppermann said.

Understanding cultural differences and bridging them seems to be one of the more appealing draws to Egypt. That’s the case for Reitoku Kawahara, a sophomore Japanese student studying Environmental Development, who chose AUC because he wanted to experience Egyptian culture.
He feels more comfortable speaking up in AUC classrooms because of the smaller number of students, which allows him to experience a different learning environment. Although Kawahara comes from a smaller campus community at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Beppu, Japan, he has gained more confidence among the large and diverse group of students here.

“Compared to my home university, AUC is very exciting […] there are so many people on campus. At first it was very overwhelming, but I got used to it,” Kawahara said. But for Abraham Saleeb, a junior Environmental Science student from the US, choosing AUC was more about reconnecting with heritage. He says he wanted to experience local culture as an Egyptian-American. His decision to come to AUC was more a result of his desire to experience life in Egypt rather than a purely academic choice. “I chose this time because I wanted to experience Cairo during fall and winter, and this semester worked best with my home university”.