Global Perspectives: Graduate Students' Experiences with Global Higher Education.

The Virginia Tech Graduate School offers a unique and powerful international program to prepare future faculty for an increasingly globalized world. The Global Perspectives Program, established in 2005, has involved more than 130 Virginia Tech graduate students in its 12 year history. The program is intentionally multidisciplinary and has been formative for the engineering graduate students that have participated. As part of the 2016 cohort of the Global Perspectives Program, students traveled to Europe during May of 2016 to visit eight different universities in three countries. Through these visits, students were exposed to a wide range of perspectives and insights into higher education. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Global Perspectives Program and its history, describe the prerequisites and presentation, describe the events of the trip for the 2016 cohort, and conclude by sharing participants' reflections on their experiences. The Global Perspectives Program, with its focus on developing students' perspectives of higher education, can help prepare students for success in an increasingly globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]