The academic year has just begun at Mount Holyoke and students have already started preparations for national fellowships and scholarships. This year, Fulbright applications decreased from 40 to 25, following last year’s major success in terms of number of Fulbright recipients. Other fellowships so far have seen similar application volumes as previous years: seven applied for the Marshall scholarship, three for Rhodes scholarships and three for Mitchell.

The recent disaster experience in Japan shows just how much the 127-million people island-nation is connected to the world: your car manufacturer may very well be shutting down their factories (suppose you drive a Toyota, which about 15 percent of U.S. car owners drive) or your order of a brand new iPad 2 may be postponed because important components for these devices are produced in Japan. And for many of us, a report on the earthquake in Japan may be the first thing to appear as we turn on the TV news or open a newspaper.

Today, one thinks of the financial sector as a collapsing industry. Yet the Internet has given birth to at least one economically promising opportunity—social lending. Set up as wholly Web-based platforms, social lending Web sites match the lender with the borrower on a personal level, rather than pooling deposits of savers and giving loans to borrowers like a traditional bank.

On March 26, South Korean warship, Cheonan, exploded near the Northern Limit Line with North Korea, complicating the political situation in the peninsula. This disaster occurred just before the 60th anniversary of the Korean War in June 2010. While experts consider North Korea as a possible perpetrator of the attack, it is looking less and [...]

At a news conference on March 8, International Women’s Day, the European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding called for stronger action against gender-based wage inequality. Women in the EU earn 82 percent of male rates, reported the executive European Commission.

Being an international student in the U.S. is, at times, like drinking from a fire-hose. You feel a mix of emotions rise as you get off the green Peter Pan bus, half-confused and half-amazed. You feel it when the International Students Orientation Committee (ISOC) members greet you and lead you to Blanchard to obtain the key to your first college room, or when you see your first U.S. tax forms. The funny thing is, you don’t even know when American culture starts to permeate your life through the most obvious way—holidays.

The first time I encountered a foreign language was in third grade, when my academic curriculum started to include the subject English. The Vietnamese school curriculum, particularly for urban schools, requires students to learn a foreign language, and English, no doubt, has been the number one choice for most schools.

The middle of Vietnam is a region teeming with business opportunities, with three UNESCO-recognized cultural heritage sites, beautiful beaches and growing industrial projects. Yet, in recent years, the local government has had to place a brooding issue on top of their agenda-how to deal with storm surges.