Study abroad opportunities continue to grow for Vanderbilt graduate students, providing career-building and networking opportunities.

"(Graduate students studying abroad) is becoming more widespread," said Dawn Turton, executive director of the Vanderbilt International Office.

Study abroad programs are more involved for graduate students.

"It's about building long-term relationships (with future colleagues)," said Joel Harrington, assistant provost for International Affairs.

Graduate students and faculty are heavily focused on research, and in order to internationalize Vanderbilt's research collaborations, Vanderbilt is working to build relationships between similar peer institutions in foreign countries using a "core-partner" strategy.

The Physics and Astronomy Department has established a core-partner relationship with the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

"Our strategy is to choose a very small number of institutions that match us and set up a limited number of partnerships," Turton said. "We really are the only school who's taken this approach, and it's been very successful."

Other programs collaborate directly with the international community. The Institute of Global Health (IGH), founded in 2005 in conjunction with Emphasis, Medical Scholars and AIDS International Research Program, supports field training for medical students in rural, resource-limited environments, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

IGH supports ongoing public health initiatives in Zambezia, Mozambique, a rural region with a high prevalence of HIV, where Vanderbilt uses several rural clinics as primary care access points.

Students have initiated several international graduate student experiences, including the Lwala Community Clinic, which opened in 2007 in Rongo, Kenya, and Project Pyramid, which seeks to alleviate poverty in developing countries through the implementation of the "bottom-up" economic ideas of Vanderbilt alumni and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus.

"Not every program requires an international experience," Turton said. "You can come out of Owen with a wonderful MBA degree focused on the U.S. economic system. It depends on what you're here to do."