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Chancellor Holub Welcoming Remarks To International Students
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August 26, 2008
On behalf of the entire community here at the University of Massachusetts Amherst I welcome you to the campus. Many of you have come from far away and are perhaps in the United States for the first time. To those of you having their first visit to Massachusetts and Amherst I offer a special welcome.
I know from my own educational experiences how disorienting it can be to land in a foreign country and begin a course of study in a new language and culture. I can assure you that we will do everything in our power to make you feel at home in Amherst. We have a wonderful and close-knit campus, a great town, and an outstanding university. I hope you will take advantage of all of them during your time at UMass, no matter how long it may be.
International connections are especially important to us. Last fall we had only 243 international students at the undergraduate level, but over 17% of our graduate student population came from abroad. India and China were the two countries most heavily represented. But we had ten students or more from 21 different nations, and almost 100 countries with at least one student on the Amherst campus.
The importance of international students and programs should be self-evident. Thomas Friedman made popular the “flatness” of the new world economic and cultural order, but most individuals in higher education have known about the essential aspects of internationalization for many years. Although I believe we have a welcoming campus for students from every corner of the globe, I also think we need to do more to attract the best minds from outside the United States. I am delighted that we have so many of them gathered here today, but I would like to see your numbers increase by the time I finish my tenure as chancellor.
As some of you undoubtedly know, like many of you, I am a newcomer to the campus and to Western Massachusetts. I arrived only on August 1st and am as unfamiliar with Amherst and the university as many of you are. So, if you have any questions about Amherst, about UMass, or about anything pertaining to Western Massachusetts, and you want an informed response, you should probably ask anyone but me at this point.
What I can tell you, however, is that I am convinced you and I have come to UMass at a most propitious time. UMass Amherst is one of the finest public research universities in the country, and it is my task to make sure it gets better. I can’t do that alone; I need the assistance of faculty and staff, but I also need the help of students if we are going to realize our enormous potential. So please join me in a common project of moving UMass into the uppermost echelon of public research universities in the United States.
