On Sept. 30 of this year, a group of high school students from Denmark arrived at Emporia State as part of the Office of International Education’s student exchange program. On Oct. 6, those students left campus for their home country in a more decisive farewell than is typical for the program.
Despite plenty of positive feedback from students and staff, the OIE has decided to discontinue the Danish student program for the foreseeable future, largely due to the demands of the project.
“It’s very time consuming to do,” said Executive Director of OIE Brian Powers, “and we’re a little short staffed at the moment, so our ability to focus the time and energy that we need to pull those off is not available at the moment. We’re kind of on pause.”
While at ESU, Danish students had the opportunity to engage with a variety of activities on and off campus and shadow ESU students for part of the day, including athletes.
“It’s been really cool to see the ESU athletes kind of take them under their wing and show them around for a day,” said Powers. “That’s an experience that you can’t really replicate.”
Powers says that, in addition to participating in campus events, the students were taken to the Tallgrass Prairie and a local ranch to experience Emporia’s natural elements. The students also visited a high school to broaden their understanding of the American education system.
As the student groups continued to enter Emporia, the time and energy it took to find housing and plan events taxed the office’s resources. The first Danish student groups were hosted by Emporia families in their own homes, but the program gradually shifted to housing them in ESU residence halls to connect students more to the campus and to mitigate burnout from regular host families.
Between dwindling resources within the OIE and the possible exhaustion of housing options off-campus, the office decided to house this last group entirely at ESU.
For Powers, the program was all about the positivity and breadth of the Danish students’ experience with the United States.
“Ultimately, I hope they leave with a good impression of what you know the U.S. is,” he said. “I think you go to a lot of places, and people have some negative perceptions about what the United States is like. But I hope that they leave with the understanding that the U.S. is very diverse and that not everything is what you see on TV. I hope they leave with a better understanding of what normal life looks like for a lot of people in this country, and what living in a more rural environment or in a less populated state looks like.”
