Letter from Founding Director
When I left Tunisia twenty two years ago as a teenager seeking the promises of a world class engineering education at Georgia Tech, it was with a mix of exhilaration, fear, hope, and admiration for my parents who let me go to a world they knew almost nothing about. At the time, I was one of a handful of Tunisian girls who left home to go so far seeking an education. As I took the leap to study electrical engineering at Tech, my subconscious wrestled with two fears I never articulated at the time: That engineering, though a great match for my scientific background and analytical skills, could be too narrow of a field and might limit what I could do to make a difference. (When you grow up in a developing country, academic achievement is central to your life and you grow up with aspirations to change the world). My second fear was that some day I would lose touch with my home country and its reality.
 From left to right: Michael Adams, President of UGA, Takoi Hamrita, and Nejib Hachana, Tunisian Ambassador to the US. |
As a student and now as a faculty member, I have made choices to embrace a bigger picture than the one dictated by traditional engineering boundaries to counter balance the pull towards narrow specialization. I have also made efforts to stay in close touch with Tunisia and its education system by participating in conferences and scientific events, serving on scientific organizations, and seeking networking opportunities. Creating an educational linkage with Tunisia has therefore been brewing for a very long time, and although opportunities to team up with colleagues from Tunisia of similar research and teaching interests are abundant, my ambition has been to capitalize on my background to try to build a bridge between my institution and Tunisia that would allow for substantial exchange and mutual benefit.
Being an engineer, I realize that building a strong bridge requires careful planning, a structurally sound design, careful selection of material, a good study of the grounds the bridge would sit on, building the bridge, and unlike physical bridges, international partnership bridges continue to grow or deteriorate according to the quality and the need for what is transported through them. This physical bridge building metaphor closely describes my efforts over the last several years as I engaged in research, dialogue, brainstorming, partnership and program design, network and team building, cultivation of financial, institutional, as well as governmental support among other things to ensure that our bridge is for the long run and that it would allow for the transport of things that are of mutual benefit to both sides.
International work by definition requires going beyond established boundaries, and in order for one to be effective in going beyond international boundaries, they need to be able to go beyond boundaries within their own institutions. As faculty, we have to overcome departmental, discipline, infrastructure, and traditional role boundaries if we are to be effective in our campus internationalization efforts. Otherwise our efforts remain sparse, timid, fragmented, and limited in scope. Whether faculty or institutionally driven, international programs should engage all layers of the university community and improve its openness and connectivity.
Perhaps this interconnection is the hallmark of the UGA Tunisia Educational Partnership. In developing this initiative, I let Tunisian national goals and strategic initiatives for higher education, as well as those of UGA, guide Partnership goals, and I let these act as magnets to attract human and financial resources; not the other way around. I engaged government, diplomats, higher education leaders, faculty, administrators, graduate and undergraduate students, staff, and community to work together towards these goals.
So far, our partnership has served as a catalyst for higher education reform in Tunisia and has piloted and supported the development of essential programs meeting educational needs in Tunisia and UGA while providing for the exchange of over 100 people representing an array of disciplines, universities, specialties, languages, titles, and affiliations.
Occasionally, I worry that building this program has taken time away from my engineering research and teaching. Then I remember my anxiety as young student about engineering being too narrow a discipline and that it might limit how I could make a difference. I realize now that engineering has equipped me with the skill set to make a difference in any arena I choose to engage in, and that it gave me the ability to think, analyze, strategize, learn and adapt. I realize that what I have been doing over the last few years is systems engineering at its best. The system in this case is not electrical or mechanical or agricultural. It is, in systems language, a highly complex nonlinear time varying unpredictable human system. I realize this partnership has taught me things I could have never learned in the lab or classroom and realize that the expertise and scholarship I have been developing through this experience is something unique and invaluable (perhaps I should call it Global Human Systems Engineering).
It is therefore my hope that this partnership and this website would inspire more colleagues within the higher education community- especially those with roots in other cultures- to venture out of their labs and the classroom to create opportunities for themselves, their students, and others around them to engage with the global community -particularly in developing countries- to cooperate, learn from each other, grow, and understand.
Parts of this message are excerpts from my article published in the Spring 2007 IIENetworker, the International Education Magazine of the Institute of International Education