Adventures of a visiting scholar in Boston & Montreal

It's been a great pleasure to be a Visiting Scholar at the Boston College Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) this week.

Boston College in the snow

Now headed up by Prof Hans de Wit, this Center punches massively about its weight in terms of its global reputation for research and analysis on the international aspects of higher education, from its regular must-read journal International Higher Education to a long list of other publications and, from September 2016, a new Masters program in International Higher Education.

As for me, this has been a great place to spend a week (despite initially Arctic temperatures!) and I've been delighted to have the opportunity to get to know the Center and its staff better (particularly Prof Emeritus Philip Altbach, Hans himself and Associate Director Laura Rumbley).

For anyone considering this type of overseas trip during your PhD, I can highly recommend it. Not only was I able to give a lunchtime seminar on the early findings of my research and get some great feedback from a very different audience (see flyer below), but I was also invited to guest lecture in a Comparative and International Higher Education doctoral class, an exceedingly rare opportunity for someone studying in a country with no coursework component to the PhD!

What's more, the students were interested and engaged, asking lots of tough questions about the internationalisation of Australian higher education and the realities of international education at home.

Now it's off to Montreal to attend a Universities Canada international meeting and the Association for International Education Administrators (AIEA) conference. Only four more presentations to go, so more on that in a subsequent post!