Twitter Chat 20131106 – Cultural Vistas

Experience is the Best Teacher & the World is the Best Classroom

Guest Post by Anthony Naglieri Director of Communications and Marketing at Cultural Vistas 

From climate change to the struggle of providing energy and other natural resources to a rapidly-growing world population, current and future generations of students will be tasked with developing solutions to challenges of unprecedented scale, geographic scope, and influence.

To be successful, these pursuits require a diversity of perspectives and practical experiences.

Simply put: they cannot take place in a vacuum.

The need for globally minded engineering and STEM professionals is well documented.

Meaningful international learning experiences, be it in the form of research, professional internships, volunteering, or work assignments in another country, provide a means for addressing this need that is not always attainable in a classroom setting.

In addition to the practical application of their coursework, these experiences can play an invaluable role in students’ personal and professional development; increasing one’s independence and self-confidence, improving communication and language skills, and providing the “soft skills” that today’s employers are demanding.

At Cultural Vistas, we believe that those who travel to other countries to deeply inquire, learn, experience, and understand cultural differences will be the ones to lead and succeed in our increasingly interconnected world.

In the engineering realm, our nonprofit has facilitated paid experiential learning opportunities for students overseas for more than 60 years through our role as the United States representative of the International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience.

Join us on Wednesday, November 6 at 8 pm EST on Twitter (hashtag #BigBeacon) as we discuss the importance of gaining hands-on international experience, as well as the benefits experienced and challenges faced by engineering students who seek such opportunities.

About Cultural Vistas

A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, Cultural Vistas annually serves more than 5,000 students, professionals, and emerging leaders through career-focused international internships, educational study tours, language immersion and cultural exchange programs in the United States and 100-plus countries around the world. – Learn more at culturalvistas.org.

Follow @CulturalVistas on Twitter

About IAESTE

The International Association for the Exchange of Students for Technical Experience is a non-profit exchange organization that provides students in technical degrees (primarily engineering and science) with paid, course-related internships abroad, and employers with highly skilled, highly motivated interns  for long or short term projects. With over 80 countries involved and exchanging over 4,000 internships each year worldwide, IAESTE (I-ess-tay) is the largest organization of its kind in the world. – Learn more at iaeste.org.

Follow @IAESTE on Twitter

About Big Beacon

The Big Beacon is a Movement to Transform Engineering Education. An Illinois not-for-profit corporation, Big Beacon was organized to catalyze a global social movement to transform engineering education. The Big Beacon connects dots among individuals and organizations to collaboratively disrupt the status quo, thereby bringing about change to align engineering education with the creativity imperative of our times. Read the Big Beacon Manifesto at http://bigbeacon.org.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy.  First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.