Introduction

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Global Engagement Insights Podcast. I'm Steve MacDonald, your host. We have an exceptional guest today, Mihaela Metianu. Mihaela, you've had your whole career in international education and what we're going to be talking about today is, if we had the opportunity to look back and say, how would we do this again? How would we plan for growth in international education? What's the ultimate guide to doing that? We're going to talk about a lot of the things that you've learned along the way, the wisdom and insights but what I'd love to do is have you first talk about yourself, your background, and what you're doing right now. Then, we'll get into some of your ideas on the short-term wins but how do we plan for the long-term growth in success?

[00:00:54] Mihaela Metianu: First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak on your podcast. I'm always excited and willing to share my experiences in international education, and I appreciate the opportunity. My name is Mihaela Metianu, and I currently serve as the Assistant Provost for Global Engagement at Florida Atlantic University, a public university in Southeast Florida located in Boca Raton. I have been in the field for quite a while. I am originally from Romania. I was born there and lived there for the first 20 years of my life and I consider that a privilege to be able to work and learn and live in different types of cultures that shaped my interest in the field of international education. I did not know this was my path, but like many international educators, we find that along the way. My experience started as an undergraduate work-study student at the University of Miami in the study abroad office. I discovered this was a career and I built on it and feel very fortunate to be part of it.

[00:02:05] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. You've talked about how international education has a cyclical nature. What you do and how there are so many different variables, but you actually see that there's a lot of pent-up interest in studying abroad and that there's a really bright and prosperous future ahead. Let's talk a little bit about the foundation before getting into the plan and what we need to be doing and thinking about as international education leaders.

[00:02:32] Mihaela Metianu: Sure. As many of us who have been in the field for a while let's say more than a decade or maybe more than two, we know, and we've observed ourselves and also learned from others that international education is cyclical and the work that we do is affected by so many variables, politics, wars, natural occurrences or natural disasters, economic cycles, business, so many other aspects that maybe we wouldn't initially think that it would impact our work. And if we're aware of that, then we can start to learn how to play the long game. If that's our plan. How do we build towards short term wins? But keeping in mind that we want to have a long plan, like a long term plan for how we want to see international education fair or succeed either in our institution, or maybe in the larger context of our university environment. For example, I came in the field in the early 90s, and I would say that's when the growth really started to happen, whether we were aware of it or not. Then, of course, we had 9/11, and that brought some slowdown and concerns. And a focus on compliance and regulations, but that ultimately ended up in more growth and we did see growth in the 2000s, then some other slowdowns due to economic or political environments. And then, of course, we had the pandemic, which was a complete unknown, particularly in international education. I would say all our sectors, all of the work that we've done was affected, whether it's with incoming international students, study abroad programs, crisis management, risk management, global travel, everything that we did was not at a standstill, but really, it was being challenged, but the work continued. And of course, after the pandemic, if we can consider now to be a post pandemic period. Now we have seen that pent up interest. People who are hungry to travel hungry to study abroad in person and in the United States, among other destinations. Our students who maybe had to put their dreams of study abroad on hold for a little while have come back in growing numbers, in growing interest in terms of the destinations and the types of experiences that they want, not just traditional study abroad, but maybe global internships, maybe other types of experiences. Maybe virtual experiences as well for those who perhaps cannot immediately get on with their travel plans. Having that perspective really helps us to think about how do we build for growth? How do we prepare for it? And how do we prepare for any challenges along the way?

[00:05:35] Steve MacDonald: The idea of growth. Really important for a higher education overall where enrollments have been declining. The talk of the enrollment cliff coming in. Yet there's this, hint of demand that we can tap into. How important do you think that is for overall for, higher education to be focusing on international education as one of the major levers that can be pulled to help address this enrollment decline and the enrollment cliff?

[00:06:04] Mihaela Metianu: I'm at an institution where fortunately we have seen growth and both domestic and international enrollment. But we owe that growth perhaps partly to our location, but mostly to the planning, to really knowing what's our niche? Who are our students? Who is most likely to want to attend our institution? And what kind of resources do we want to extend? Not only to invite students here, but also make sure that they're successful while they're here and whatever is true for domestic students can also be true for international students. Yes, they have different needs. In some areas, they have more needs. They're further away from home, but they're still students. And they need that sense of belonging. So building growth, with the understanding that students need to feel that they belong at that institution will also result, not in only more growth, but bringing other students who also, have the match or the affinity to that specific university and in the U.S. we have thousands of institutions of higher education. There is one for any international student who wants to study here. Some want to go to Ivy League. Others may want a small private education. Some may want a public university that has many resources and where you can get the full United States campus experience, with the campus life, with the football games, basketball, something that might be more unique to our university life in the U.S., but certainly that attracts. And I think really helps international students to integrate.

[00:07:47] Steve MacDonald: Let's talk about the plan for growth. You have a good focus for starting out. You have a lot that we want to talk about here. But talk about the fundamentals. You brought that up first. Tell us what you mean.

[00:07:59] Mihaela Metianu: What I mean by having your fundamentals right is as in any discipline, whether you're a professional athlete, a musician or an educator in order to be successful long term. First, you have to learn the fundamentals and make sure that you get them right, and then they're there for you all the time. What do I mean by that? Understand your organizational structure, whatever your sphere is, understand that, understand how resources are secured, staffing, training, and of course, content knowledge. Make sure that you and your team are really experts at the work that you do. And you do that by learning from others, reading, going to conferences, really being on top of what's new, and understanding the complexities of international education in this case. That to me is fundamental to any plan that you want to build thereafter. And that will help us to address any challenges that come along the way because we have our fundamentals, right. We can veer course, we can change directions, we can readjust better. If our fundamentals are right, if we're in a more chaotic situation where we don't know what's going on with our team, we are not really aware fully of their potential and the resources that they need, then it's more difficult to change course when things are difficult.

[00:09:33] Steve MacDonald: In terms of fundamentals, getting some of the processes, even in how people enroll and how big of an impact. In fact, you have a story about how small changes actually can have a very pronounced impact on enrollment and then ultimately, growing the whole program.

[00:09:49] Mihaela Metianu: Yes, actually I can share a story to highlight that. Several years ago, many years ago, we had a new enrollment manager person in charge of enrollment management, and he was very interested in growing international student enrollments. And he was very excited to talk to me about recruitment of international students, and in our first meeting, my plan and my proposal was, for us to discuss something completely different, which was, what is our admission cycle? What happens to students who apply to the university and how long it takes them to get through that process? And he was a little bit surprised. He said, Oh, I thought we were going to recruit more students. And in my mind, before we recruit more students, let's make sure that the ones we do have apply have a good experience and that we get our processes right. Something as small as, for example, at one point, our admissions application for undergraduate students only had a fall intake. And that makes sense for many universities because they will admit students to fall and then they might defer some to the spring. That's not necessarily how it works for international students. In fact, half the world may be on a completely different academic calendar. They're in a different hemisphere and their academic year starts in January. After advocating for that little change, we did see a growth in applications and in students who are coming in and that spring intake, which for a school that's located in South Florida makes a lot of sense because many of our students do come from Latin America who follow that calendar. Sometimes really small changes can make a big difference. Also, we started using international students to work with students who are in the admission cycle, but maybe had not completed their applications just following up with them saying, I noticed you applied, but you didn't complete your application. What can I do it to help, those little things that were custom made for international students really helped to increase our yield. And of course, once we had that figured out, we went out and started recruiting more students. But it's really important to have a good setup and so that's the admissions funnel, but it's the same with housing your meal options. How staff from different offices understand that they need to work with international students. Those are all little things that you need to do, and you can't just do them once. You have to do it all the time. We can't just put people in a course on global competencies or intercultural communications and say, great, you've done the course. Now you're ready to go. You have to continuously work on that and keep those connections going and keep training and retraining not only your staff, but also other colleagues that work with your students, with international students in this case.

[00:12:56] Steve MacDonald: All this is so important preparing for the growth. It's not necessarily a broken system, but if a system isn't created to handle the volume we have right now efficiently, then if you just put more into that, it's going to exacerbate any problem. You also talked about externally. And preparing for growth in terms of the partnerships that you have in place. Talk a little bit about the external component of preparing for growth. Externally, in addition to just being connected and aware of what happens in the regulatory landscape. The Department of State landscape with visas, what happens in other countries and building those relationships. I think in this context, I'd like to talk about building your own professional network external to the institution. So, whatever position we have or level we have, it's always good to have not just mentors, but peers with whom we can discuss various issues and see, if maybe they know how to do it in a different way, and just have someone to talk to sometimes. So, in the case of senior international officers. It's mostly the case that we're the only one in that position at our university. Yes, we have other colleagues that have maybe similarly complex roles, but there's not another one like us. And the way to deal with that is to find others who are in a similar position and deal with similar issues and discuss what is the challenge at your institution? How are you addressing this? How do you discuss with your vice president or the president a specific matter? How do you deal with staff morale? How do you handle hybrid work? When you're a student facing office. We can't all just work remotely all the time, but we need to keep that in mind. Those are some of the examples that I can give in terms of how I've collaborated with many of my colleagues to be able to get through some of these challenges together and also, what other aspects of expertise do they have that I don't have or I don't have enough of. I really enjoy building and developing young professionals. Someone else may be really good at budget management. But we can both learn from each other and become better at the areas where we don't have as much expertise in. So important because we can all get so busy with our jobs. We can say, I don't have time to do some of those proactive things, maybe that'll be beneficial or not. But the bottom line is there's tremendous experience to tap into and knowledge and insights. And what you're saying is in preparing for growth, we don't always know what we don't know. And it's really important to reach out and make sure that we're understanding some of the best practices and what others are doing, how they're facing those same challenges. So there's a lot in preparing for things that we know can go wrong and things that are unforeseen. Tell us a little bit like, in terms of compliance, how does this fit into the plan for growth?

[00:16:08] Mihaela Metianu: Because of so many aspects of international education being compliance driven or affected by rules regulations. I think that having a good compliance plan in place is critical and that's completely within our control, in the sense of not how those rules and regulations are always implemented or created. But in terms of how do we communicate that and how do we make sure that we are well trained and that we have a good plan in place. One example is global travel risk management. This is an extremely important and sensitive matter on any campus. Not only knowing where our students, faculty and staff travel and making sure that they have plans in place in case of emergencies. But also being able to facilitate those experiences and not just making it about compliance. In my view, a well run compliance and regulatory plan is almost invisible. If you do it no one will notice it. People usually notice when there's a problem and when there is a problem, that's out of control. How well do we rely on those plans to be able to resolve the issue? And to that, I think the communication piece is really important. So having a strong communication plan that goes along with your crisis management plan, with your regulatory compliance policies and procedures with making sure that, we comply also with all of the other university regulations with Title 9 and all of the other policies that impact higher education on a daily basis. Having good communication plans and having open communication about problems is really important. It's not about who made the mistake. If there's an issue, how do we resolve it together and we can then talk later about how we can avoid it in the future. But immediately, we need to be able to address the issue and make sure that people are comfortable coming forward. And explaining what the problem or the issue is. That's not specific to international education, I'm sure. but it's something every day.

[00:18:25] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. And you brought up in our conversation we had before another really important point here, which was earning the respect from your colleagues. The internal relationships that you have to be reliant on and you're advocating for, inside of the institution. How does the focus on this help gain that and earn that respect and the trust from your colleagues?

[00:18:48] Mihaela Metianu: In order to gain respect, first and foremost, you have to be good at what you do and deliver services consistently at a high level. So, I have another example. I think it's always good to illustrate with examples. When I first started in international services at my current institution I came into a situation where things are really out of shape really not well maintained and the image of the office was not very good on campus. So my first job and responsibility was to make sure that we provide good services. And then we gain the respect and I would say by providing consistent quality service by showing that you truly care about whoever your stakeholders are, whether they're faculty trying to get a grant, whether they're students trying to find financial aid to go abroad. That you truly do have that compassionate approach to your services, but you also have the knowledge to do it well. The way you gain respect internally. And I would say both internally and externally an important component is to be a giving professional. What do I mean by that? To share your knowledge, to be able to help others through your expertise. There really are enough students for all of us and more. So, by sharing our expertise and how we do things at our own institutions really can help all of us build together. The pie is big enough for everybody. If we take that approach and we are giving of our time, expertise, willing to help, then I think we'll receive the same in return.

[00:20:33] Steve MacDonald: That sharing of knowledge, one of the most important things as an SIO is sharing the knowledge that you have with others, whether it's the president, whether it's the deans. That kind of proactive advocacy of reaching out and saying, here's what we can do for you. This area, in terms of preparing for growth, historically in international education we've shared student stories and experiences as proof points of the importance of international education. As over the last decade or so the whole world's gone through a digital transformation, and now there's data, there's the quantitative side. That helps tell a story that we haven't been able to tell really before. How important do you think it is that the job of an SIO in preparing for growth and advocacy efforts to get a handle on the data? And know what's going on, not have silos of data and gaps in data, but then be able to use that data. How important is that to the overall role and then the growth international education?

[00:21:38] Mihaela Metianu: I think that you bring up an important point about how data can tell a story. That allows us then to bring in sort of the individual examples and stories of students or others who, have had success. But in terms of data, yes, I think we're in a very fortunate situation right now that a lot of data is available in our institutions and outside, it's much easier to identify it and to maybe compile it. There are so many sources and honestly, we have experts on campus who can help us gather that data. I do believe in data informed decisions. Not just data driven, but really data informed, which means that rich information, the numbers, the graphs, the stats. They are one of the things that we consider. There are so many other factors that we need to consider when we make decisions that affect people. We have to take into account many more aspects. But I think being able to access and manage that story that the data says in an effective way is probably one of the most important aspects of what a young professional in this field should learn. Many of us are not statisticians, we're not mathematicians, not necessarily. But honestly, we don't have to be, we just need to know where to find the data. And who we can ask to help us put it together in the best possible way. And then we can use our expertise to tell the story.

[00:23:11] Steve MacDonald: That story can be not only the potential, but it could be sitting down with the Dean and saying, look, we've had these partnerships and programs in place, and we haven't been taking advantage of it in the way that we can and how we can help you. So the data tells the story and you mentioned grants. The faculty they love having data to support, a history of impact, that's going to help them, get those grants. There's so many ways that international education. If you have the data to tell the story, you can be that advocate internally and not just advocating in terms of here's why international education helps benefit students, but how it helps your college , how it helps your grant process. How it helps them do their job and accomplish their goals.

[00:23:59] Mihaela Metianu: Exactly the things they're interested in.

[00:24:01] Steve MacDonald: Yes,

[00:24:02] Mihaela Metianu: that's what they want to know. Not what I'm interested in, but we certainly can find common ground. I would say using data can also help us rethink certain programs, for example, because we want growth. But, we might have things or programs that might have worked years ago and maybe we have an emotional connection to them. But the reality is that we need to sunset some of them so that we can focus. On other initiatives, and it's much easier to make that happen. If you have that information available and say, okay, this particular exchange program or a partnership, let's look at the numbers. We are spending so many resources, so much effort and the output is not that significant. And I'm not just talking numbers, but what are we getting out of this particular program or partnership? How about we take that energy and those resources, human, financial, and we put them into this project, which also is of interest to you. And these are the benefits that you can have by redirecting your resources. It's difficult to make that shift without the data.

[00:25:17] Steve MacDonald: And if I was going to say, okay, all that data and the benefits that we've been talking about here, Mahalia, if I took that away, how does that impact your ability to be an SIO? And to help the organization, the university, the faculty, the Deans, if you no longer had access to that data, what would that mean to you?

[00:25:39] Mihaela Metianu: I can't imagine really doing my job without having that type of information. It's anywhere from securing resources, staff positions, funding, and really showing the impact that international students have on campus, whether it's tuition revenues, contributions to research. I would then be relegated to anecdotal stories, and I think those stories are fantastic, but they're not going to get us much without having the actual data. So, it's really difficult to imagine doing this work. Without having access to data.

[00:26:16] Steve MacDonald: And if I could have you just accentuate the conversation here, if you could rate on a scale of 1 to 10, the importance of having that data for the advocacy efforts, for everything, for the growth plan. Ultimately, we're talking about here on this podcast is how do we plan for growth? How important is that data to plan and execute on growing. One, it's not important at all. 10, it's vital for our growth plan. Where would you rate that?

[00:26:45] Mihaela Metianu: Of course. I would rate it a 10. I just said, I don't think I can do my job without it, but it is vital. And it really does help us to focus and refocus our resources and energy. Whether it is in identifying new markets where we want to find recruitment for students, or maybe develop new partnerships, or how we can couple partnership development with student recruitment to be more effective. We can't do that without having the data, and I feel that's definitely a 10, at least on my scale.

[00:27:17] Steve MacDonald: You shared so much here. Thank you so much for that. If there was a main takeaway that you wanted the other folks, your peers that are listening in here to take away from the total conversation, what would that be?

[00:27:31] Mihaela Metianu: I think that many SIOs can relate to this and hopefully would agree to what I'm about to say that international education and growth in this area is not just the job of the SIO or of the international office or the staff whose primary job responsibility is to work in that area. It really is an institutional responsibility, and it permeates through all aspects of what we do. If we want to build and develop students who are globally competent in their professional lives and their social responsibilities, then we have to make sure that international education and its benefits sort of permeate throughout all of the aspects of university life and the work that we do in higher education.

[00:28:22] Steve MacDonald: You recommended that you learn from your peer community and you've just helped that and promoted that cause by being on the podcast here. So thank you. And if there were follow up questions that people had, what would be the best way that we could connect them to you?

[00:28:40] Mihaela Metianu: I am on LinkedIn, so that's one way. People can reach out to me on LinkedIn. That might be the easiest way. And I think if you Google my name, you'll find me on the FAU website very easy. But LinkedIn is a great way to connect with other people in the field.

[00:28:56] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Again, thank you for coming on. We appreciate your time today.

[00:29:01] Mihaela Metianu: All right. Thank you for having me. I appreciate your time.