On a morning in the middle of June, Giovanna Takano Natti, who hopes to graduate with a B.A.S. in 2024, was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief. After a year of studying engineering from her bedroom in Londrina, Brazil, and several agonizing months of waiting for word on when the United States would allow international students to enter the country, her student visa arrived in the mail. Eighteen months after accepting admission to the U of M’s College of Science and Engineering, Takano Natti learned she would finally be able to study in person this fall at the Twin Cities campus.
Of all the U of M communities impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps none experienced the displacement and uncertainty as keenly as the approximately 6,000 international students who arrive on campus each fall. (For comparison, the entering fall 2021-22 freshmen class numbers 7,500.)
And according to the Institute of International Education, the U of M has ranked in the top 25 among colleges and universities in the number of international students it attracts for four of the past six academic years.
In a normal year, these international students contend not just with the bureaucracy of visa applications and international travel, but also culture shock, varying levels of English proficiency, and sometimes, a sense of displacement that comes from feeling like an outsider.
Those challenges only intensified in March 2020, when the U of M switched to remote learning. While the University allowed international students to remain in their dorms—and an estimated 130 chose to do so (55 of them were freshmen)—others returned to their home countries and switched to online classes, complicated in a number of cases by being in a different time zone.
