Unique Pathways and Global Perspectives Through Study Abroad with Neal Crosson [Episode 161]

Lauren 0:00
Hello, my high school counselor listeners. I’m excited to bring you another guest episode today. I originally connected with Neal Crosson over on LinkedIn as he started following me based on another podcast episode that I shared or that was shared out. He is colleagues, or knows, Julia Rogers from around the international gap year student programs world, I guess you would call it. Julia Rogers was on a past episode where she talked about gap year programs. And you’ll hear a little bit of crossover here in what Neal has to offer.

Lauren 0:36
Let me introduce you to Neal, and then I’ll give you a preview of what we’re going to talk about. I’ll let you listen in on our conversation, and then we’ll wrap it up. With over seven years of experience in international education, Neal Crosson is passionate about helping students explore unique pathways in higher education. As national admissions manager at Verto Education, he guides students toward their first year abroad, offering academic, cultural and personal growth opportunities beyond traditional study abroad programs.

Lauren 0:36
Having lived and studied in Spain, Costa Rica, and Turkey, he’s seen firsthand how international experiences transform students’ academic and personal development. His background includes teaching ESL, leading gap year programs, and crafting college admission strategies, all fueling his commitment to making global learning accessible. Neal believes every student deserves a chance to gain a global perspective, and he’s here to share how counselors can support their students in taking that first step towards an enriching, transformative year abroad.

Lauren 1:33
In this episode, you’re going to hear about a unique pathway that I hope you will find valuable to share with your students, kind of outside the norm of what you might usually be talking about when you sit down and talk about your post secondary planning with them. We talk about a gap year type international experience. I don’t know how to condense it into one sentence here, but you’re going to hear Neal explain what this popular program is that is honestly becoming more and more popular with our students who are heading off to college. I’ll let him do the talking here, and then we will chat here at the end about what we learned from the episode.

Lauren 2:14
You got into this profession to make a difference in your students lives, but you’re spread thin by all the things that keep getting added to your to do list. I can’t create more hours in the day, but I can invite you into my Counselor Clique where you’ll finally catch your breath. Come with me as we unpack creative ideas and effective strategies that’ll help you be the counselor who leaves a lifelong impact on your students. I’m Lauren Tingle, your high school counseling hype girl, here to help you energize your school counseling program and remind you of how much you love your job.

Lauren 2:46
Hey Neal, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here to talk about just global perspectives and how that affects our high school students.

Neal 2:55
Thank you, Lauren. And yeah, I’m super excited to be here. Global perspectives, international education, experiential education, all of these things wrapped up into one. This is what I’m here to talk about. This is what gets me super excited and what I am passionate about. So I’m very excited to be joining you today.

Lauren 3:12
Yeah, we talked a little bit off air about your background and experience, and I read the listeners your bio, and all of your experience has been in this world with all different job experiences, but it’s really cool that it has pointed you back here to continue like leading high schoolers into this world, which could be really unknown to high schoolers. So will you tell us what is Verto education? First just go ahead and give us a little intro to like the people you work for.

Neal 3:40
Yeah, absolutely. And I also want to make a note here that yesterday was National Study Abroad Day. So this conversation is quite, the timing of it is, is quite good.

Lauren 3:52
This is how you’re celebrating. You’re talking about this.

Neal 3:56
100%. Yeah, but to answer your question, yeah, what is Verto Education? Verto Education is a first year or freshman year of college study abroad organization that is really trying to pair the best of both worlds between a traditional gap year experience with the academic backbone of a study abroad experience. It’s not traditional study abroad. It’s not traditional gap year. It is first year abroad.

Neal 4:22
So all students that are starting in a Verto Education program are recent high school graduates. This is their first collegiate experience, and rather than going to a traditional campus, they’re going to be starting in, you know, one of five different Verto study centers. It’s our study center model, our campuses in miniature. But the idea is really for students to have an academic experience, earn transferable college credit while they are immersing themselves in different country. And the second part of our model is we exist in the US higher education ecosystem here. So we partner with dozens of colleges and universities across the country to really make good on this, this promise for students to get a gap year without the gap, get the experiential part, the transformative first year experience, but then to have a clear path forward to continue their education and graduate within that four year timeline.

Lauren 5:22
Yeah. So as someone who’s not sitting here, my listeners are listening, they’re not, they don’t have your website pulled up, so they’re hearing this about this for the first time, I have a couple like practical questions. So when a student is going into their freshman year, are they, say around here, going to Clemson University, and then they’re noticing that there’s this option to study abroad? Or are they applying to the study abroad program, knowing I just kind of want to take a gap year, like, how is a student kind of piecing this together? Like, this is, I’m going to go on this experience.

Neal 5:52
So I’m going to give you an answer that it’s probably a little bit longer than you might expect. On the one hand, we have what we call traditional students at Verto. These are students that are seeking out a first year abroad experience. Maybe they are, you know, thinking about a structured academic gap year. Then they come to us, finding us through our website, finding us through social media, and deciding that, hey, you know, this is something I’m interested in learning about, hitting apply and engaging with us from there. The other part of that is that some of the universities that we work with actually invite students to Verto Education. They will select a subset of their first year applicants and decide to offer them, hey, if you want to come to our institution, if you want to come to our university, we’d like to see you studying abroad for the fall semester, or maybe the fall and spring semester, so the full academic year.

Lauren 6:50
That’s cool that you mentioned that, because that’s what I was thinking. I have heard of someone doing that at our school around here that everyone wants to go to is Clemson. And I don’t know if Verto is connected to them, but I know a girl who went and did that her first semester, and I thought that was so interesting. I wonder if she chose that or if the university offered that to her.

Neal 7:06
To be honest, oftentimes students are first hearing about Verto through their university. And the same with the college counselors, with education consultants. A lot of times when their student comes in, and this will be in their official decision letter from that university saying that, hey, I received this invitation from, and I don’t want to show favoritism here, but we have some long term partners of University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Vermont, William and Mary for just to name a few, they might extend this offer to a student that may have been wait listed, to a student that may have been given a spring admit, or a student that, in the case of some of our partners, even denied. And saying that, hey, we see a lot of potential in you. We would like you to have this experience. And to keep in mind, these students are earning transferable college credit that have been, you know, reviewed for articulation to that university. And assuming that student meets x, y and z, then they have this sort of guaranteed closed loop back to that university. For us right now, this is a time of the year that we colloquially refer to at Verto Education as channel season, because this is the channel pathway, the invitation pathway, where right now or soon in the next couple weeks, 1000s of students are going to be extended this offer across the country.

Lauren 8:26
So it’s your busy season right now. You’re about to be answering lots of questions, inviting lots of students in.

Neal 8:32
It is our busy season, or really, on the cusp of our very busy season. Yeah.

Lauren 8:40
Okay. Well, for a student who is considering this, or a counselor who is encouraging a student about an experience like this, what do you see as an advantage for a student going and doing a study abroad, especially in a gap year time like before they go to college?

Neal 8:58
Yeah, so a lot of times I think of the Verto experience as allowing students to reap a lot of the benefits of a gap year, a lot of the personal growth, experiential learning, really just building up this, you know, this portfolio of different experiences that facilitate the growth of that student. So having them engage in something different is really opening up the door for what we call finding their why, or finding that thing that they’re passionate about, exposing the students to something different. And let’s say they are, you know, thinking about a specific college major, maybe this will give them the confidence to say, like, actually, yeah, this is what I am dedicating myself to, or really opening up the door to have this more exploratory experience where that student can, you know, take different courses, have different experiences, and decide, like, actually, you know, maybe, uh, maybe I’m not considering engineering anymore. Maybe I’m actually considering, you know something else.

Neal 10:02
So it is trying to give students the breathing space to do something exploratory while still progressing along their degree path. I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the coursework that’s offered at Verto, it is facilitated through the University of New Haven, which is our academic provider, or really our our academic backbone. But the coursework is meant to fulfill general education courses, anything from a seminar in academic writing to biology, different business courses and things like that. So that seems to rest assured that they are continuing to progress along their degree path, taking the same kinds of courses they would do as a freshman at a traditional university, but getting that study abroad experience at the same time, that global experience.

Lauren 10:47
Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, I’m just being curious right now. I know I kind of read in your bio, you’ve had some study abroad type experiences, or you’ve lived other places. Can you kind of tell us, give us, like, a little snippet of your international experiences? Because I’m sure they pointed you to what you’re doing now.

Neal 11:05
100%. Yeah, it’s sort of become my, for better or for worse, my personal brand, in a lot of ways.

Lauren 11:13
Your entire personality.

Neal 11:15
Exactly right. Oh, yeah. So I’ve studied abroad more than most people. By that, I mean I had my first study abroad experience as a rising senior in high school.

Lauren 11:26
Me too.

Neal 11:27
Oh yeah? I spent a month in Costa Rica throughout high school. I always studied the Spanish language. It’s been a huge passion of mine. I studied abroad a summer in Costa Rica, came back, finished my senior year of high school, and eventually the Spanish language became my my major in college, which, of course, led me to study abroad in Spain with a focus on the international world. I also studied international development in Istanbul, Turkey. And yeah, thinking about when I was a college graduate, like many students, I found myself questioning, what is the path forward after that, you know, as a recent college graduate. A lot of questions were sort of, you know, bubbling in my mind of, you know, what am I going to do? How am I going to enter the workforce?

Neal 12:16
And I decided that, Hey, maybe I need a sort of adult Gap Year, which led me to through some some research provided by one of my my Spanish professors. I remember he walked in the classroom and wrote on the board this link that said, you know, to the Spanish Ministry of Education’s website. And he said, Hey, there’s this program where you can go to Spain, you can teach English. They’re not going to pay you a lot of money, but it’s really good experience, and it’s the opportunity to live in a foreign country. So I remember writing that in the back of a notebook and putting that notebook away, and then right as I’m about to graduate as a senior, pulling that notebook back out, finding that link, finding this program applying to it, and what was originally going to be a one year stint of teaching English in Spain ended up turning into three years, a master’s degree, and really just a wealth of experience living in a foreign country, of having to navigate a foreign country using my second language.

Neal 13:20
And I decided, okay, the adventure continues. So upon leaving Spain, I found work as a program instructor at the gap organization of a company, and I ended up leading programs for about a year in Hawaii. So not exactly International, but working directly with students that are seeking out something different, something transformative, that are wanting to, you know, engage with the world in a different way, through volunteering, outdoor education, through, you know, just learning about Hawaiian culture. And then I found Verto, and they were, they were seeking out someone based in the DC metropolitan area as a regional admissions counselor. So that was sort of my bridge between study abroad gap to now, sort of entering the world of higher education, which I feel like is a perfect metaphor for my own organization, for Verto Education, because it’s really what we are trying to accomplish. It’s a lot of things, but blending the best of a lot of what these different programs have to offer.

Lauren 14:28
That’s cool. I did a study abroad before my senior year of high school as well, in Salamanca, Spain, and I look back and I’m like, How did my parents just let me go to Spain for like, five weeks? Like, would I do that for my kids? I mean, I hope so. A lot of the characteristics that you were describing of, like, I came back more independent, and I think my parents already did a pretty good job of, like, making me advocate for myself in a school setting and whatever. So this was kind of the icing on the cake, but it made me confident to go live away from home, and, you know, be an adult at 18 years old. I was ready for that.

Lauren 15:05
And so I do think there are so many, so many skills that come from, from leaving your home and kind of doing that still in a safe place where you have supports, you have teachers, you have program leaders. You’re not totally on your own, backpacking somewhere, but you have the support of a program, which is pretty cool.

Lauren 15:21
I wanted to ask you, counselors are listening to this. Maybe they have in mind the students who are these, like high achievers, who they say, Oh yes, they’re going to be perfect to go study abroad, you know, wherever it is, whenever it is, whether it’s before their freshman year of college or during college. What kind of characteristics would you say a counselor should be looking for in a student who they would who they would encourage to go do this? Or would you say anyone is kind of qualified to do it? What should a counselor like be looking for in that student first and foremost, before they refer them to a program like this?

Neal 15:54
So I’ll give a bit of a nuanced answer here. You know my personal stance is that anybody can benefit from this type of experience. That being said, the world of study abroad is it’s a self selecting population. While anybody can benefit from it, it’s not necessarily the best experience for everybody, particularly at different times of their life. They’re going to want to see some students that are, I think, exhibiting a bit of independence, exhibiting a bit of maturity. And, of course, these are the same kinds of things that the students will ultimately receive as benefits from participating in a program overseas. But they have to, that student does have to recognize that, hey, you know, I’m going away to college, which already in itself is a big leap, and then to add the layer of I’m going away to study in a collegiate environment in a foreign country, that’s when you know reality might start to set in. And think like, oh my goodness, this is a daunting experience.

Neal 16:57
So that student, I think, should be fully prepared in terms of the research they put into it, of understanding what that experience is going to be like. You know, with the college counselor, I think, kind of facilitating that, that research, or facilitating, you know, just thinking about those, those ideas. But they’re going to want a student who’s going to display some of that maturity, some of that independence. They are going to have to understand that to study abroad is exactly that. It is to study abroad and not just to be abroad, which, of course, in different countries, there are going to be different temptations than you would expect, compared to a, you know, for that student being in the United States. So having that, that ability to, you know, to self regulate and to advocate for oneself, I think, are going to be hugely important, especially when those traditional support networks, family, counselors, things like that, are not going to be present with them on site, at least in traditional sense, being able to self advocate in front of, you know, the program, staff, the directors, the faculty and country is going to be hugely important.

Lauren 16:57
Yeah, I think that’s a great point. They have to have a little bit of that independence and maturity already, but they’re only going to come back with more of it if they take advantage of the program and they grow in the way that you intend them to grow. Because I’m sure there are kind of milestones as they’re there, like you’re going to class, you’re passing your classes. You get to go on adventures on the weekend, like there are probably so many fun things, but they have to be able to balance it all and and do it all in another country, which might be intimidating.

Lauren 18:34
I’m sure parents have thoughts on programs like this too. I mean, maybe parents or students, their hesitations. What would you say to parents or students whose hesitations are the cost or affordability or safety? I mean, that’s a big thing when the parents are sending their students far away. And then transfer credits, because we’re talking about a program that they’re earning credits that are coming back to their school. So how, how do you address these big topics that are surely gonna come up as they’re doing their research about stuff like this?

Neal 19:04
Oh, man, yeah, when it comes to, I guess, the parental response to the idea of studying abroad, I see a lot of you know, a full spectrum of different reactions in there. On the one hand, you have parents that are like, do it. This is the best time in your life to do it. You know, oftentimes they have study abroad experience themselves, and they are reflecting on that and thinking like, oh, man, if you can do this as a freshman, go ahead, do it. You’re going to have an amazing experience. On the other hand, you do have parents are a little bit more guarded, a little bit more hesitant with that, thinking about like, oh, you know, whether it’s first year abroad or a gap experience, this misconception that there’s going to be a lack of structure, or there’s going to be a lot of distractions, you know, for that student in place.

Neal 19:49
So I think reassuring parents that you know, in the context of first year abroad, students aren’t just they’re not the traditional study broad population. These are young adults, ages 18, 19 years old, trying to not only navigate a foreign environment for the first time, but a collegiate environment for the first time. And with that as a first year abroad program, we have to, you know, make sure that there is a high level of student support in place in country, you know things like safety protocols, student orientations, where not only are we showing them, you know what to do in the case of emergency, what numbers to call, what staff to call, but you know even some life skills. How do you feed yourself? How do you navigate a grocery store in Florence, Italy, for example. How to use a gas stove, which, you know, is surprisingly not intuitive for a lot of students. So letting them, you know, letting parents know that there’s going to be a high level of support in place for their students through, you know, we have a role at Verto called our Student Success Advisors, or SSAs, which are program staff that work with a cohort of about 30 students per advisor. And this person is, you know, is a former program instructor for, for gap. I have a lot of respect for these professionals, because they wear a lot of hats. They are the big brother, big sisters, older siblings, for a lot of these students, providing mentorship, socio emotional support as well as academic support to make sure that that student is having a positive experience while abroad.

Lauren 21:31
Well, it’s cool that they’re that person exists there, because think about our students going off. They’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to run into something, whether they get sick there, and they don’t know what medicine to take because their mom has always given it to them, like the things that you find in the transition to college, they’re going to have that in another country. And so how they’re going to respond to that is going to test their independence and maturity, but having somebody there and knowing how to use the supports, I feel like, is going to be a way that they’re going to grow when they’re there.

Neal 21:59
And that’s why I say that, you know, and this is something that we try and still in our students, is that idea of self advocacy, of self authorship, of when there’s a problem that arises, the quickest way to solve it is by addressing it with, you know, with the resources available, with the staff on hand. Not to call mom and dad and play this game of telephone where mom and dad then emails our Dean of Students, and Dean of Students then talks to the program staff, and by the time that loop closes, the problem was resolved already, you know, a week ago, right?

Lauren 22:31
I mean, that’s never happened before, right?

Neal 22:34
Oh no, no, never, never, never. But it is, I mean, that is the reality of working with first year students, is they need an extra layer of support, compared to your juniors or seniors in college that have two, three years of college already under their belt, so they know how things work. They might know how to advocate or self regulate a little bit better than some of these younger students. And you had asked a question for seeing some concerns that parents might have about maybe some of the more logistical aspects of the program, you know, talking about the transferability of credits, for example.

Lauren 23:11
Because I’m sure the parents want to know like, Hey, you’re doing something that’s going to make sense with what you said your path was going to be. Because I bet they come into this like, Well, I was gonna go straight to college, but this opportunity came up. So the parent wants to know, like, you’re going to keep continuing with that plan, right?

Neal 23:28
That is a common scenario where you know a student might come and say, like, Hey, maybe I want to have this experience before committing to a four year school. And parents are like, Oh, well, I don’t want you backpacking across Europe for an undefined amount of time. So where are the guardrails? What’s in place? Where’s the structure here? In the context of Verto, at least, you know, we work with an academic provider, as I mentioned, which is the the University of New Haven. So the the courses that students are taking will be coded for University of New Haven. The transcript will reflect University of New Haven. If, you know, if I’m thinking about a transfer applicant from Verto, and they are, you know, at a different institution, they’re looking at that student’s transcript, it’ll be like, Oh, this was a University of New Haven transfer student. But in reality, it’s actually, oh no, this student spent a year overseas.

Neal 24:22
So with that, the student is gaining, you know, an official college transcript, so schools that will accept transfer credit from the University of New Haven are definitely on the table in terms of what comes after that Verto experience, and to reassure parents that their child is getting, is earning credits from a regionally accredited institution. And then with some of the partner schools that we work with, some of the pathways that we have in place, we have this awesome direct transfer pathway that dozens of different schools have set individual eligibility requirements in terms of GPA, number of credits earned, number of semesters completed with Verto. Andassuming that student would reach those, those different checkpoints there, then they have dozens of different direct transfer schools, schools that are guaranteeing admission to students based on their Verto performance.

Neal 25:10
So from the student support side, you know, there’s a lot of support on the ground for that, for that student, it’s the reality of the population that we work with. For the post Verto plan, the academic credentials that student is earning are widely transferable to schools across the United States, but especially to the partner universities that we work with.

Lauren 25:35
What you’re saying, what I’m hearing you say, is, you do a lot of the back end kind of research of transferring those credits, and someone who comes in either directly through Verto or through their university, it’s like y’all have already worked through how we transfer the credits, how they show up on your transcript, making sure all those things are seamless. They just go get good grades in their classes, and the parents can rest assured, they will transfer, like you can have that conversation up front, but they’re going to transfer how they’re supposed to if, because I assume you’re doing that work behind the scenes, to make sure that happens.

Neal 26:06
100%. And you know, if I, if I were a business student, right now, a business grad student, I would definitely use Verto as a an interesting case study, because there’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of collaboration across different institutions that Verto works with. So yeah, we put in, we have a lot of hard working folks here that are very mission driven by the idea that, you know, we need more students getting out there and having these global experiences now more than ever. So we are very dedicated to making sure that, you know, not only we talk to talk and in this gap year without the gap experience, but we also walk the walk in, in terms of providing students with that, that continuity forward.

Lauren 26:50
Yeah, I love that. And it’s not just traveling, like you said, putting on a backpack and going to Europe for an undisclosed amount of time. Like there are guardrails here that say, like, this is my plan during this time, when I finish, I’m going to go transfer here. It gives parents reassurance. It gives students a goal to work towards. And I think it’s a really cool program and a cool opportunity that I mean, you might tell me it’s been around for 100 years, but it feels like more of a newer, popular thing that colleges are offering for students these days. Like you said, whether it’s they were deferred, they were rejected, this is just an opportunity we want to present to you to see if you’re interested. And more and more students are doing it, which I think is cool.

Neal 27:29
100%. Yeah. And I think you are hitting on something there, that first year abroad as a concept is, it’s fairly new. I mean, there are some institutions that have, you know, historically had a first year abroad program in place, and UN is one example that, Northeastern University is one example that comes to mind. Our organization,we’ve only existed since 2017, we’ve been able to work with about 3000 students since then. But it is becoming something more more popular amongst students, amongst universities, as something that they want to offer. If they’re a large university that can facilitate, let’s say, multiple campuses internationally, then they might have a first year abroad program in place, where Verto, we sort of serve as in the middle there, working with lots of universities that maybe, you know, it’s not a great solution for them to have a bunch of international campuses where they would send students for that first semester, that first academic year.

Lauren 28:28
Well, I’m sitting here thinking about counselors having these conversations with students in their office. They’re planning for the future with students and parents in their office, like individual meetings. And I just think that this episode will be super valuable to them, just to consider this as a pathway, as they’re laying out, where their students could go after high school. Because we often will spout out two year college, four year college, straight to work, military, like those are kind of like your four main pathways.

Lauren 28:58
And we’re good at talking about those four things, we get a little nervous talking about things that could be a little different, because we’re not sending hundreds of kids from our, even our big high schools, to go do this. It might be one kid a year, or every couple of years, who takes this challenge and runs with it, but I hope that this episode could just be a thing that goes, filed in the back of their mind, so that when a student kind of mentions wanting some adventure or wanting to try something different, where they have that letter from the university and they say, What is this? I don’t know what to make of this, help me, that they can hear a little bit about a program like this and think, Okay, that’s a pathway that I could send some of my students on. I think this information will be really valuable for counselors to take back to their students.

Neal 29:43
Yeah, and, you know, I appreciate that. I think a big part of my role is really to educate counselors, you know, on this subject, or really to maybe try and bring down some resistance to the idea of trying something new or trying something different. and this just represents a stepping stone along that. It might not be, you know, starting on that traditional campus, that first year, there might be the the sacrifice of having to miss those big, you know, football games and events like that, but trying to help students understand that like you know, this, this ultimately is part of the bigger picture here. This is ultimately helping you achieve your goals and just giving students that reassurance of, you know, hey, maybe consider it from this angle. Maybe understand that this is a viable part of your college experience, just in a different way.

Lauren 30:39
Totally. And with anything there are trade offs. Like you said, yeah, maybe you missed the freshman orientation or the first home football game, but okay, you are hiking in the Alps, or you’re like, rafting in Costa Rica, or something like, I promise you’re gonna have some unique experience to come back and share with friends that you make.

Neal 30:58
Well, easier said than done. Trying to tell a young adult that, like, Hey, you might miss out on what everyone else is doing but in the greater context of your of your life, you know, taking that, that trip to Spain, you know that that might represent a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Lauren 31:15
Right, that would be hard. That would be hard.

Neal 31:18
I do work with a lot of adults that when they learn about, you know, these kinds of experiences, when they learn about Verto Education, they think, where was that when I was in school? Or, man, I wish I had, I had studied abroad. And I would make the argument that the freshman year is is likely the best time to study abroad, without the constraints of major specific courses, without the constraints of different social relationships, which are, you know, powerful factors in your late teens, early 20s.

Neal 31:51
And just being able to live in a foreign country or experience a foreign country is the closest that you can get to living a second life, in my mind. And who wouldn’t want to experience that, maybe I’m biased here, but who wouldn’t want to experience that, that formative period. And to be able to look back, you know, 10, 20 years from now and reflect on on that, and then say, like, Hey, I took the leap. I did it, I pushed my comfort zone, and I gained a lot from it. And that is what we, that is the argument that we try and make to students all the time, which, you know, doesn’t always work.

Lauren 32:29
But it’s worth a shot.

Neal 32:32
Worth a shot, of course, historically easy to to persuade population right? Kidding, of course. But yeah.

Lauren 32:39
well, hopefully a counselor, hearing you say that, and just like hearing all the value that comes from that, that, like I said, goes in the back of their mind when they’re having that conversation, saying, you know, I think you’re a great candidate for this, and I think that you’ll only grow because of it. I love the point you made about really doing this before you’re invested in friendships and community at the school, like they can do that their sophomore year or after that summer period, whatever that is, they’re going to assimilate and find their way into that and find their friends when they get there. But it is harder to peel away from leadership positions that you’re taking or you’re going to be a TA for a class you had to apply for that, like those kinds of things, are harder to pull away once you’re already invested in the community. So I do think it would be really advantageous to do this in between high school and college. So this was a great conversation.

Lauren 33:27
After they have listened to this. Is there somewhere where counselors should go for more information? Should they go to your website? Should they be looking at colleges websites with their students? Like, what should they do to get more information next.

Neal 33:41
absolutely. Yeah. So for Verto specific things, of course, the vertoeducation.org. That is our website. And you know, within that, we have a lot of great resources, not only detailing our different campuses, our course registration guide, which I think is going to be hugely important for counselors, in particular, thinking about their students, of if they participate in Verto, how will those individual courses, how might they transfer? So we provide our our syllabi online with the University of New Haven course codes. So for any transfer equivalency tools out there, it’s just kind of, you know, plug and play with those course codes.

Neal 34:17
We have a blog on our website with a ton of different resources detailing some common student experiences. You know, how to finance your your time abroad, what to expect, how to apply for a passport, things of that nature. But for general information, you know, I think gooverseas.com is a great resource for that. It’s sort of the Yelp of of this international education world with tons of different programs that are listed and available, including our own. I myself, I run a counselor webinar series that details different parts of thestudent experience. What does academics look like at Verto? How do we incorporate experiential learning in our classroom? So any one of those, those different resources, both to learn more about us and also learn more about what other programs are out there.

Lauren 35:11
Well, it sounds like they have a lot of learning opportunities if they want to actually learn more for their own professional development. But also, I mean, I would take this information and put it on my school counseling website, put it on my school website, so that students know it is a different pathway than maybe they’ve heard of before that it’s even a thing. Because just exposure to something new, I think, is really powerful for our students, especially if they don’t have siblings or parents who have done study abroad. This would be a whole new thing, but they might be the right student, and this might be the right fit for them. So thank you, Neal, for being on the podcast. This was super insightful, really helpful, to give our counselors just another option for their students as they’re planning their post secondary options.

Neal 35:53
Lauren, thank you so much for for having me on here the day after National Study Abroad day. Yeah, I really enjoyed our conversation, and I’m excited for your listeners to hear it too.

Lauren 36:03
Awesome. Thanks.

Lauren 36:05
Okay, wasn’t that inspirational to hear Neal talk about this program that maybe you haven’t considered? You heard me mention in the episode that I did a study abroad program when I was in high school, and talking to Neal just got me reminiscing on that. I thought about all of the characteristics that I developed when I was there, and the growth opportunities that I had to be pushed out of my comfort zone and grow while I was still in high school, which is wild. But I don’t think people look back on an experience like this and say, I wish I wouldn’t have done it. You hear more of the I wish I would have done it. I wish I would have taken more time to do this. What he was kind of echoing from parents saying, I wish I either had that experience or wish I could go back and do it again. And I’m sure if you had an experience like this, you listened to this episode and thought, wow, what I would give to drop everything and go study abroad in another country. It would be really cool, right?

Lauren 36:56
So I hope you take Neal’s resources, whether that’s the webinars that he offers to counselors or just the websites that he offers, and share them with your students. Let them know that this is an opportunity for them that maybe they haven’t considered before. Or maybe when they get that admissions letter from their college that they’re planning on attending next year, and it offers them an opportunity to go study abroad, point them to this episode, or point their parents to this episode. I know I’m talking to you as high school counselors, but if it could help others, share it out, let them know what is out there and that this is a viable opportunity for them. I’d love to just spread this message far and wide and let people know that there are true advantages to having a global perspective as our students move from high school into the college arena. So I hope this episode was helpful for you and gave you some new ideas as you’re working with your students. I’ll see you next week.

Lauren 37:50
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of High School Counseling Conversations. All the links I talked about today can be found in the show notes and also at counselorclique.com/podcast. Be sure to hit follow wherever you listen to your podcast, so that you never miss a new episode. Connect with me over on Instagram. Feel free to send me a DM @counselorclique. That’s C, L, I, Q, U, E. I’ll see you next week.