Back when she was a freshman planning to major in engineering at Howard University, Camille Carter had no interest in studying abroad.
“I wasn’t really that adventurous,” Carter explained of her thinking at the time.
But now — as one who has studied abroad in Ethiopia, Chile and Turkey before she graduated in 2014 — Carter is one of study abroad’s biggest proponents.
“I would say definitely go for it,” said Carter, a materials, process and physics engineer at Boeing, the aerospace giant. “You get to see how other countries or classes of students attack education.”
Carter’s experience abroad is part of a growing trend documented in a new report being released today by the Institute of International Education, or IIE.
And that is, students who study science, technology, engineering or mathematics — more commonly known as STEM — are the fastest growing group of American students studying abroad and the largest share at 23.9 percent of the roughly 313,000 who went abroad in 2014-2015, according to Open Doors, an annual report that provides demographic and other detailed information on students studying abroad.
Specifically, whereas about 68,800 American STEM students studied abroad in the 2013-2014 school year, in the 2014-2015 school year the figure jumped to more than 75,000 — a 9.1 percent change and the largest increase among the top five major fields of study, according to Open Doors.
