As a global campus, UC Davis aims to address the challenges faced by students and scholars from all around the world. By addressing the impact challenges have in both their local and global contexts, Global Affairs supports students and scholars arriving at the university from other areas within the region, state, country and world.

Global Affairs provides a plethora of training resources that help staff support scholars and students throughout their global educational journeys by offering staff learning and development courses through Services for International Students and Scholars (SISS) and the Global Learning Hub.

As part of the Global Education for All initiative, Global Affairs launched the brand-new staff learning and development course, Advising for Global Impact: Helping Your Students Become Globally Engaged. The course has been accepted as a formal elective for the UC Davis Academic Advising Certificate, Level One.

“As the Global Learning Hub integrates global learning into the UC Davis campus culture and curriculum, it is vital that we build systems that support advisors and other campus stakeholders,” says Brianne Holden, director (interim), global learning advising and outreach in the Global Learning Hub within Global Affairs. “By staff members completing the new Advising for Global Impact course, students are one step closer to emerging from their educational experiences at UC Davis as community members who approach their posteducational endeavors with empathy and understanding of differences—and with skills to help them navigate global challenges.”

The Advising for Global Impact course aims to arrive at three major outcomes: sharing skills, resources and advising frameworks; orienting the advising community to the wide range of opportunities that the Global Learning Hub offers; and sharing key resources and tools that advisors can most readily share with their students. Additionally, advisors are given the opportunity to collaboratively address relevant global issues.

Ultimately, Advising for Global Impact provides an opportunity to build networks and connections and discuss global learning activities that are happening across campus, in addition to the offerings within the Global Learning Hub, because global learning is relevant to domestic students, international students, undergraduate, graduate and professional students, faculty and staff.

International Service Mission

Global learning plays an essential part in helping scholars and students build skills that prepare them to navigate different cultural, political and regulatory environments. With this in mind, Global Affairs offers a host of staff learning and development courses through SISS that provide staff with direct training on fostering, hiring and supporting this important aspect of university life.  

“In order to provide immigration and visa services for international faculty, researchers and other academic visitors, SISS depends on host department staff to provide much of the information needed to arrange for visa support and work authorization for scholars,” says Wesley Young, director of SISS within Global Affairs. “We offer courses in three areas: J-1 visas, H-1B visas and Permanent Resident cases.”

SISS makes sure host department staff work closely with SISS advisors to provide what is needed to get international scholars here in a safe and timely manner and also facilitate work authorization for scholars who will be working at UC Davis.

“When visas and work authorization are obtained in a timely and smooth manner, international scholars and their families can focus on the many other challenges of coming to a new and different culture to live and work,” says Simone Kueltz, assistant director of international scholar services for SISS. “If these things are difficult, the transition can be even more stressful than usual and can even derail the purpose of coming to UC Davis in the first place. So technical details that may seem like a bureaucratic bother can greatly affect the sense of welcome.”

Furthermore, she says that the courses also help host department staff better understand the challenges faced by new international scholars and their families. This often leads to a greater sense of empathy on the part of host department staff and more appreciation for both the knowledge international scholars bring and their contributions to the cultural variety of our community.

“Because the research conducted by UC Davis faculty is highly specialized, there is often a very small community of scholars located around the world who can fully understand and contribute to the collaborative effort that most scientific fields require to make progress,” says Kueltz. “Even outside of STEM disciplines, scholarly collaboration is often a prerequisite for successful research and publication. This same logic that explains the benefits of a diverse group of scholars on research and teaching extends to the service mission of UC Davis.”

Kueltz says that international students share in the rich diversity of faculty research and subsequent discovery of new knowledge, noting that a recent survey found that over 30 percent of UC Davis faculty members did their first university degree outside of the United States. 

“UC Davis faculty and researchers work to provide solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems—hunger, climate change, international conflict, just to name a few,” Kueltz says. “The mission of UC Davis is to make the world a better place, whether that be in our community, in our state, in our nation, and even in other countries. That is the university’s service mission, and SISS is proud to play a role in its success, especially through these courses.”

About Global Affairs at UC Davis

Global Affairs brings the world to UC Davis, welcoming more than 10,000 international students, scholars and leaders, and hosting programs that inspire global curiosity, understanding and engagement. Compelled by the valuable outcomes of thinking globally, we make transformative opportunities a reality by supporting the thousands of students and faculty learning and researching globally—and by facilitating collaborations that tackle the world’s most pressing challenges through more than 150 global partnerships.

Putting our vision of a UC Davis community that engages, thrives, and leads in this interconnected world into action, Global Affairs is in pursuit of an ambitious goal: Global Education for All.