World Citizens - DePaul University

AT HOME in the WORLD:
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS on CAMPUS
Some 900 students from nearly
100 countries around the globe are
part of the current DePaul family,
according to Rosanne Roraback, director of the International Student
Office (ISO). Most of them are graduate students, most enrolled in
the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business or the School of Computer
Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems (CTI); another
sizable group is enrolled in the English Language Academy.
They’ve come—these bold, well-educated, highly motivated
students—to enjoy the advantages of a superior university education. As
to what happens after that, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, winner of
the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, raises a question in a recent essay that
every international student at DePaul considers over and over: “…the
question of how much we belong to the country of our first passport and
how much we belong to the ‘other countries’ that it allows us to enter.”*
In talking with these students, it’s fascinating to see how they
process this essential question as they make themselves at home at DePaul
and in Chicago and move through their schooling and their lives.
Shahzad Sabir (COM ’01), who returned to Pakistan after graduation
and recently stopped by the ISO to say hello during a business trip,
says the quality education empowered him to make a difference in his
community and helped him in his family business.
“You learn in the USA to be adaptive, and when you return to
your home country you use the same skills to adjust back in the culture
and try to make a difference through your education in your own
environment,” he says.
Sabir loved his experience at DePaul—the lifelong friends he made,
the fast pace of Chicago and the valuable business skills he gained. It
was difficult for him to return. “I felt like a different person there,” he says.
But, using the networking skills he had learned at DePaul, he found
like-minded people in Karachi when he became involved in Rotaract,
a service club for people 18 to 30 sponsored by Rotary International.
Today, Sabir says he has an ideal balance of “here” and “there;”
his education has enabled him to boost his family’s wood-products business
to an international level in a newly thriving Pakistani economy,
and he can live there with his family while traveling around the globe.
Dalto
*Pamuk, Orhan, “My First Passport,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2007, p. 57.
Liu and Michal Mordarski, CTI international student from Poland
20 f e a t u r e
by Carol Sadtler