Supporting Student Collaborations Posted on February 28, 2006 Oscar A. Barbarin (bio) shares the joy of bringing international students together to do research.

I'd like to talk about how I have tried to generate collaborations. One of the things, in a very planful way, I have tried to help other people, for example students, to develop collaborative relationships with other people who are graduate students. So when I was at the University of Michigan, I ran the South African Initiative office, and I created what we called the summer fellowship where we would bring South African scholars, usually young scholars, who were lecturers, who may have a master's degree or bachelor's degree who are working on a PhD.

So we'd give them time to use our libraries and to talk about their research, and what I would do is I would identify one of our graduate students who might be interested in doing research in South Africa. They would be their companion, pick them up at the airport, help them locate housing, help them maneuver and find their way around the university.

And I created a seminar where I brought them together, and we talked about the research that each was doing. It was on that basis that they got to know each other, and so then the [American] student would go over to South Africa, and the scholar that we brought over would reciprocate, helping them to find housing, helping them to get a location within the department, and involving them in some of the projects they were working on. And there were numerous collaborations. I had a couple of students who developed dissertations jointly with other South African scholars based on this kind of collaboration.

And so wherever there's this kind of reciprocal give-and-take, and particularly when people are at the same stage, and thinking similarly, and posing questions they find that cooperating really helps both of them.

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