Study Abroad during Undergraduation: academic and professional implications
1. Student exchange programs. 2. International education. 3. Higher education. 4. University students - Scholarships. 5. Vocational training. 6. Science without Borders (Program: Brazil).
Internationalization and globalization have been important topics in the world since the 15th century. The two terms are closely linked, but they possess distinct meanings and are composed of different dimensions. It can be inferred that globalization impacts on higher education to the extent that institutions of higher education seek to respond to the requirements of an interconnected and global world. As a consequence, over the past twenty years, the internationalization of higher education has been on university agendas and the federal government has developed public policies designed to promote higher education internationalization. Thus, in 2011, the Brazilian government launched the Science without Borders program, a public policy initiative for augmenting the internationalization of higher education, not only on the undergraduate and graduate levels, but also with respect to visiting professors and young talents. In this light, the present thesis seeks to investigate the effects of foreign undergraduate study on the academic development and career trajectory of former recipients of Science without Border sandwich scholarships of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) during the 2011-2014 period. To investigate the issue, the research adopted theoretical aspects of the internationalization of higher education in order to understand the academic and professional implications of undergraduate international mobility on the part of UFBA students who completed the Science without Borders experience. Considering that academic formation designed to educate citizens capable of acting efficiently in a globalized, interconnected and multicultural world is increasingly present in contemporary universities, the results reported in this thesis can contribute to improving the process of higher education institutional internationalization and to stimulating the development of models that take into account the idiosyncrasies, conditions and necessities of the internationalization process.