For the past ten years, New Mind Education has been committed to addressing the academic, social, and developmental needs of international students studying at American universities through its accredited University Performance Program (UPP). New Mind’s curriculum has always focused on high-impact experiences, student-directed personal development plans, and individual advising sessions with experienced cultural mentors. Like all educational institutions, the COVID pandemic forced New Mind to examine how to achieve it’s lofty goals within new academic and physical restrictions and challenges. Always innovative, New Mind used the forced adaptations of the crisis as an opportunity to reflect, research, and strengthen our commitment to putting students firmly at the center of their own learning and development.
As a team, we reviewed our entire curriculum, from our mission statement to student challenges to program design towards our singular focus to be the gold standard for international student support. As a result of our efforts, we redefined our three major program goals of developing cross-culturally competent citizens, fully engaged learners, and future evolving leaders and broke them down further into a common set of nine attributes, three for each goal.
New Mind identified the following nine attributes as being essential to student development and future success: cross-cultural awareness, open-mindedness, self-awareness, growth mindset, independence, good communication, sense of purpose, confidence, and problem solving.
These attributes were selected based on extensive research into the needs of successful international students, including “soft” skills noted by major employers as being highly desirable and key to equipping students to face future challenges in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Using experiential learning as its foundation, New Mind advisors help students explore the nine attributes, which are addressed and integrated across advising sessions, module areas of interest, and student life activities, to form a holistic learning experience. Progress and reflections are tracked using a revised holistic rubric which allows students and advisors to set goals aligned to the nine attributes and three major goals.
This fine-tuning of the New Mind curriculum better allows both students and advisors to explore and customize the student learning journey, set concrete goals, and reflect on progress made both inside and outside of the classroom. It is expected that students will leave UPP with a better understanding of themselves as well as a set of skills that will help them identify what they want and how to achieve it. New Mind is proud of its commitment to being on the forefront of innovation in international student support.