Obstacles to Accessing Quality Education

Obstacles to Accessing Quality Education

WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT INTERNATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR LATIN AMERICANS

by Marcela Yeckle University Innovation Fellow Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología

Studying abroad is a hard topic to talk about, especially if you live in Latin America and you don’t know anyone who lived that experience. There are so many challenges: funding, level of English, VISA documentation, references, level of maturity. I won’t end this article if I keep mentioning them. Will I be able to understand classes in a foreign language? Will I be prepared to cope with the culture shock?

So many questions like these come to the mind of young students, and the fear keeps growing to the point that they don’t want to talk about it until they feel prepared. As a Peruvian student, I decided to get involved in the process little by little. So in my first year of university, I decided to identify any kind of opportunity that reached me to international education and life, just for living the experience. The first step I made was to talk with other students studying in my field about the possibility of joining international organizations related to our field, and it worked! We founded a big Civil Engineering Student Center for all the students interested in exploring their career with the security of receiving quality resources to grow professionally. Then, thinking about doing an exchange program, I talked with some people in my university who were involved in international programs. Ironically that’s how I heard about the UIF program for the first time. Four years later, I can’t believe that I know people from all over the world, that I understand what international education opportunities exist, and that I have a better sense of the vision international students have about their ideal type of education. Since I realized all that I won from just asking a person about international opportunities, I set an objective to make it easier for students to get involved in any kind of international opportunity they wanted. Nevertheless, there was something that I was missing. So, instead of looking for solutions, I decided to look deeper into the problem. What were the real challenges that Latin Americans faced in seeking international opportunities? In my research, I found the main reason that it’s necessary for me to share with everyone who doesn’t know about the reality of education in Latin America. The most principal problem is the inequality of opportunities. Most countries in Latin America face the problem of centralization, which means that on one hand, you can see a fully-developed city and people with access to quality education and resources to keep growing as a person and a professional. On the other hand, if you go far away from that city, you can see a different reality — people with no access to basic needs in public schools don’t have a quality of infrastructure, curricula content, or trained teachers to guide students in their learning process. Therefore, most Latin American people don’t look for international opportunities because they don’t even have an idea of how life is in developed countries, they don’t have a reference that tells them about the different opportunities they have, and they don’t have people who can support and advise them. All of these reminded me of my parents. All my life they have motivated me to look for international opportunities to improve my way of life, but when they were my age, their reality prevented them from even thinking about it.

My intention with this article is to encourage more people to join the movement to change the reality of education both inside and outside their environment. If you’ve had the chance to have a quality education, share your experience with people you think should know about it. If you are Latin American and you had access to a scholarship, exchange, or internship abroad, inform people about how you found it. If you wish, you can start generating activities that let more people know about what education and, therefore, a quality future is. There are so many solutions, and if we work together we can improve the quality of life of thousands of people.