Illinois International News

Illinois International News is a collection of globally-focused blogs and stories from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Analicia Haynes, storytelling coordinator at Illinois International, shares a first-hand account from her experience covering the first day and the last day of a month-long summer program for students at South Korea's Chungnam National University. The AI and Generative Models: From Algorithms to Applications research program was coordinated by Global Education and Training and took place from July 13 through August 7, 2026 on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. 

Global Education and Training collaborated with Kazakhstan to develop a new education management program that was implemented in September.  

GET Program Coordinator Shynar Imangaliyeva submitted a commentary article about the Bolashak program to University World News that was published on June 11, 2025. The article, which is titled A global scholarship with outsize impact at home and beyond, highlights the impact the Bolashak program has within the United States and outlines the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign experience.  

The Bolashak program at Illinois continues for 2025-26, with about 30 Bolashak Fellows currently on campus for their 12-month stints. 

Global Education and Training at Illinois International collaborated with the University of Johannesburg in South Africa to host a 10-day intensive training program on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus in April 2025.

Global Education and Training (GET) collaborated with colleagues at Parkland College and several University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign departments, amongst other local and regional academic institutions, to host a week-long intensive program in vocational education.   

The program, which spanned from May 5 to May 9, benefited a group of 20 higher education professionals (plus two translators) from different colleges in Kazakhstan.   

Global Education and Training (GET) and Global Relations at Illinois International collaborated with the University of Johannesburg (UJ), a Universitas 21 global network partner, to host a 10-day intensive training program for the Future Professors Programme (FPP) and the Accelerated Academic Mentors Programme (AAMP).

Fourteen faculty members from several universities across South Africa will transform their teaching, learning, and research during a 10-day program starting April 14 on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

Global Education and Training (GET) welcomed two visiting scholars from Kazakhstan to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus in 2021 participating, for the first time, as hosts for the Bolashak Scholarship Program.

Bolashak fellows attending the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign participated in an Oct. 28 Intercultural Spotlight Series event and created a video documenting that event.

“Our goal in this long-term English program is to help them express their dreams, visions, etc. and seeing where they get to go (after IEI) is great,” said GET Coordinator Allison Wheeler.

Mergen Dyussenov stood at the back of Room 182 inside the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s (Illinois) Armory Building on May 9. Next to him was a large poster filled with gray-highlighted text and two pictures.

The Global Education and Training (GET) and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Shanghai Office teams celebrated 30 years of collaboration with Chinese partners in March 2024.

"Reflecting on my nine months at Illinois, I can confidently say that the Bolashak Visiting Scholar Program didn't just enhance my skills—it supercharged them," — Nurken Aubakir, current Bolashak Visiting Scholar and Dean of the School of Transformative Humanities at Almaty Management University (AlmaU) in Kazakhstan."

Global Education and Training hosted a welcome reception celebrating a new cohort of Fulbright Fellows on Feb. 6 inside the Siebel Center for Design.

URBANA, Ill. — Global Education and Training (GET) Director Matt Rosenstein and Grant Brewer, GET Associate Director for Strategic Initiatives, traveled to Kazakhstan to participate in the “Bolashak: Strategic Partnership and Cooperation” forum on Nov. 30.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has been selected by the Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman in Washington D.C. to host a 2023-2024 Foundation Year Program.  

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will serve as the host institution for 15 Bolashak International Scholarship recipients during the 2023-2024 academic year. The 9-month program will be designed, developed, and managed by Global Education and Training (GET) and the Intensive English Institute (IEI) in Illinois International. This is the third consecutive year that GET and IEI have hosted a customized program for visiting Bolashak scholars from Kazakhstan.

Matt Rosenstein, the director of Global Education and Training, presented at the first Partnership Dialogue Series hosted by our colleagues from Kyushu University in Japan.

“It was incredibly valuable to have a sense of what my undergraduate experience would be like, as it helped me to feel more prepared,” said Ghala Buarish. “My not-so favorite experience was spending holidays away from my family but thankfully I have made close friends here.”

New and pilot disability center directors from Egypt participated in their final break-out session with their mentors during the Amideast Study Tour on Feb. 14 inside the Illini Union.

Global Education and Training (GET), in partnership with Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES), will host a second Amideast Egypt University Disability Services Study Tour at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Feb. 5 through Feb. 16.  

The Study Tour is developed in partnership with Amideast Egypt. It is sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and supported by the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education through the U.S.-Egypt Higher Education Initiative Public Universities Scholarships program.  

Champaign, Ill.— Kirby, a big, white, fluffy therapy K-9 with the University of Illinois Police Department, revisited 507 E Green St on Jan. 24.

Tsubasa Akatsuka, a current visiting scholar and LEAP intern, talks about experience in the program, his time studying abroad and other life experiences. 

Kirby, a big, white, fluffy ball of fur, worked his way around the fourth-floor conference room inside the 507 E Green St. building.

Mohammed Sami A Kattoa played a video during a recognition ceremony on Wednesday, May 18.

Kattoa was one of 11 students that participated in this year’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Gifted Student Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The video he played was an inside look into what the students did this year.

Global Education and Training is hosting a recognition ceremony for this year’s KAUST Gifted Student Program.

Global Education and Training and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences International Programs Office, in partnership with Amideast, welcomed two students to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign during the Fall 2021 semester. The students were recipients of the Amideast U.S.-Egypt Higher Education Initiative Public University Scholarship, which supports Egyptian scholarship students in developing independence, confidence, and career skills through a semester of experiences at a U.S. university. The scholarship program also interweaves private sector and practical experiences so that graduates are primed to enter and contribute to the workforce in Egypt, in sectors that are critical to the economic development of the country. The scholarship program is funded by USAID and supported by the Ministry of Higher Education.

In her own words, Nermeen Mohamed Abdelmaged shares experiences from the program including living in Champaign-Urbana and developing future plans and goals.

The International Programs Team in the College of LAS hosts a podcast, Our Global Campus: Engage the World Through Illinois. This podcast features the international and intercultural experiences of students and professionals who dare to explore life on the other side of their cultural assumptions.

Meet Assel Aryn and Kuanysh Abeshev. As Bolashak International Scholarship recipients, Assel and Kuanysh are scholars and educators from Almaty Management University (AlmaU) in Kazakhstan, which is among the top universities in KZ/Central Asia per the QS World University Rankings. They are top leaders at AlmaU: Assel serves as the Vice-Rector, and Kuanysh serves as the Dean of the School of Engineering Management, respectively.

Global Education and Training (GET) prepares today’s global workforce through our executive training programs, professional capacity-building programs, and specialized projects. Participants in GET-hosted programs learn about current trends, practices, and techniques in the United States and today’s global market, gaining competitive advantages over their peers.

Global Education and Training (GET) is offering a 4-week online undergraduate summer school program: “Artificial Intelligence in Data Science," July 19 – August 13, 2021.  

Rob Siedenburg is a senior instructor for advanced academic writing at Global Education and Training (GET). Following a career in publishing, Rob was invited to join the GET team as an English instructor, and he has spent the last decade working to support international students' educational experiences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many international students were unable to embark upon or continue their studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. As a result, the Academic Bridge program was developed to provide international students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a residential experience in their home country and access to educational facilities and services.

In summer 2020, Global Education & Training and the Intensive English Institute offered a summer enrichment course for Saudi Arabian students participating in the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Gifted Student Program. Called, "Ready, Set, Undergrad," this course was geared toward KGSP students who completed a Foundation Year program at one of six host institutions in the United States, including Illinois. In the fall of 2020, they were enrolling as first-year students at prestigious U.S. colleges and universities.

Meet Guangzhou. Guangzhou Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For the past two years, Guangzhou has been a graduate student employee at Global Education & Training.

Meet Jiayi. Jiayi Li is a current student at the Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, China. Jiayi was a 2019 undergraduate summer school student in GET's Engineering Research Academy program. Her hometown is the city of Chengdu, located in the Sichuan province of China.

At Global Education & Training and the Intensive English Institute (IEI), we are proud to host the KAUST Gifted Student Program (KGSP) Foundation Year, in coordination with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Institute of International Education (IIE).

Meet Doha. Doha Amer is a current first-year student at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering within the Grainger College of Engineering. During the academic year 2018-2019, Doha was a member of the KAUST KGSP Foundation Year cohort at Illinois.

Meet Monika. Monika Mendoza has been a ConvoPartner with the Intensive English Institute for over 25 years! She is a valued member of the University of Illinois community, and we spent time with her, learning about her generous spirit, her capacity for building friendships across cultures, and her commitment to the international student experience in Urbana-Champaign.

Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider is a Teaching Associate Professor of Computer Science at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).  With a passion for data, he has taught a variety of data-centric courses (Data Structures, Data Driven Discovery, among others) and works with students on numerous data visualizations that have accumulated over 25,000,000 interactions.  He has been selected as one of the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Education scholars; awarded the Collins Award for Innovative Teaching; and he has been consistently ranked as an excellent instructor by his students for the past ten years.

At Global Education and Training, we are proud to contribute to strengthening the University of Illinois’ strategic partnership with Zhejiang University (ZJU) (浙江大学). 

ZJU, a comprehensive research university, with its main campus in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, is considered one of China's oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher education. Illinois has established multiple modes of cooperation with ZJU, from faculty research collaborations to student exchanges. Formal agreements supporting dual degree programs in multiple disciplines and a joint institute for engineering on ZJU's international campus in Haining highlight the innovative institutional strategic partnership between the two universities.   

Meet Don. Don Hardin is an adjunct instructor in the College of Applied Health Sciences Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Don also has more than 30 years of NCAA volleyball coaching experience, at both the University of Louisville and the University of Illinois, where he was the head coach of the Illini women’s team.

Meet Cheelan. Cheelan Bo-Linn is the Senior Specialist in Education in the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning (CITL) at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Instructor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership. In her position in CITL, Cheelan is responsible for the promotion of teaching excellence in campus-wide faculty consultations, programs and innovative initiatives, in addition to working closely with academic units, most recently with Illinois Colleges of Medicine, Business, and Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences. Areas for consultation have included course and curriculum design, learning outcomes and assessment, and active learning. She also leads and coordinates the campus faculty development programs, such as the annual Faculty Retreat, the Junior Faculty Seminar Series, and the college Teaching Academies.

Students from Beijing University of Agriculture share their experiences from Global Education and Training’s 2016 Agriculture Management Program. Developed together with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences (ACES), students participated in lectures with Illinois professors, site visits to local farms, and corporate visits while immersing themselves in the full American college experience. This program was generously supported by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

GET will offer EducationUSA Leadership Institute workshops abroad in Kazakhstan and Japan in 2017, as a continuation of a similar program GET ran in 2015 after being selected as a host institution by the Institute of International Education (IIE) on behalf of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).