More and more college graduates have begun to look for employment opportunities abroad. At an institution like Mount Holyoke, students are constantly exposed to countless occasions to engage in global conversation through study abroad programs, international internships and direct interactions with our diverse student body. It is thus, without a doubt, that in each graduating class from Mount Holyoke, there are often a handful of students who decide to work or pursue advanced degrees overseas.

Amongst several post-college opportunities out there, Otema Stephanie Adu ’09 decided to pursue a Master’s Program in chemical engineering at Aalborg University in Esberg, Denmark. The MH News interviewed this budding chemical engineer on life, work and future aspirations. <

It would be hard, to say the least, to condense the life of alumna Chin Oy Sim after her graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1992. “It was quite a hodge-podge!” she said. “Not unlike my self-designed major at Mount Holyoke, Third World Development Studies, comprising of courses in Women’s Studies, Anthropology, Geography, Politics and Economics.”

After graduation, life took Flossy Matekwor Azu ’09 half-way around the world to Sendai, Japan to teach English. A native of Ghana, West Africa, she has adjusted nicely to her new home. How she got to Japan is all a blur—from the sleepless nights spent searching for a job, through working as teacher of special education in Natick, MA, to finally secure a teaching job in Sendai.

Zillin Cui ‘11, an economics and Spanish double major and originally from China, is currently studying abroad in Chile. She shared with the Mount Holyoke News some of her insights about the education system there.

“The dream of the parents here is that our children continue their education after the age of 15,” my host mother in rural Ramón García, Nicaragua told me. She didn’t have the opportunity to attend school but benefited from the adult literacy campaign after the 1979 revolution. Alfebetización, or the literacy campaign, was launched in the early 1980s by the Sandinistas, members of a socialist party in Nicaragua. University students paused their studies to travel to rural areas of the country, teaching literacy to adults.

Danes and Americans often ask me why I chose to study in Denmark. Covering an area half the size of Maine and with a population of five million inhabitants, the country represents a mere 0.008 percent of the world’s 6.7 billion people. Yet what attracted me to Denmark was not its size, but the state’s culture and unique welfare system.

For a liberal arts college student, the contrast between a big university and a small, intimate college can be drastic. As a fellow student here in the U.K. told me, “At Mount Holyoke, you are always taken care of with professors making sure that you are on the right track. Here, you are pretty much on your own.”

The Internet has fostered communication between diverse people in a way that is completely unprecedented. One can speak to someone halfway across the world with the click of a button, and discover an entirely different worldview. But what happens when such opportunities are abused, and people use the Internet to locate self-affirming political echo chambers?

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.