KU News Release

LAWRENCE — Thirty-five international students will attend this year’s Fulbright Pre-Academic Summer Program at the University of Kansas to help them acclimate to academic life and American culture before they begin their graduate studies. The students arrive today.

With the help of KU faculty and staff, the Applied English Center is offering a three-week program that focuses on English language and refinement of academic skills, technology and research training, Fulbright program goals, orientation to U.S. university life, survival skills for graduate students and cross-cultural orientation. KU is one of seven institutions offering this summer program to 250 of the more than 1,800 new Foreign Fulbright Fellows. KU has offered a program for new Fulbright students numerous times since the 1960s.

Students will visit the Statehouse in Topeka and the American Jazz Museum, the Negro Baseball League Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, have dinner with a Lawrence family and spend an afternoon at Clinton Lake.

“The Applied English Center is excited to have the opportunity to welcome these amazing students from all over the world and to help ease their transition into U.S. graduate studies in the fall,” said Margaret Coffey, associate director of the Applied English Center.

Two of the students will stay at KU to work on their graduate degrees in economics and curriculum and teaching, respectively. They will be joined by 18 Fulbright international students who will matriculate in the fall.

The program is funded by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Cultural and Educational Affair and administered by the Institute for International Education in New York.