International Education: A Professor’s Perspective

After some 20 hours of intercontinental jet travel and an hour zooming low over snow in a small propeller plane, Sarah Young finally touched down in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan. It was the middle of a cold snap — most days hovering near zero Fahrenheit — in a country that had never been on her bucket list. Two weeks later, she left with a deeper understanding not just of the university where she’d been remote teaching for two years, but also of her own scholarship in a global context.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Young, a lecturer in the University of Arizona College of Information Science, teaches an online digital ethics course to dual degree students at M. Kozybayev North Kazakhstan University (NKU), where undergraduates can earn a U of A degree in tandem with their NKU degree. In March 2026, she taught there in person for the first time, and being there surfaced something she hadn't fully clocked from a distance.

NKU's program leans heavily technical, training students to build tools and systems. Young’s own work, by contrast, explores the intersection of technology and society, centering how people adopt and push back against new tools and platforms, as well as ethical questions around who's affected, what's fair, and what's at stake. 

"I think the U of A College of Information Science brings a bit more of that sociotechnical component — the human element," she says, noting that for many of her NKU students, that framing was new territory entirely. While they’re complementary sides of the topic, standing in an NKU classroom made the contrast between Young’s own focus and the perspective her students bring legible to her in a way it hadn’t ever been from more than 6,000 miles away behind a screen. 

Building on International Experience

A similar recalibration reached Young’s research on emerging technologies. Her recent work has focused on quantum computing. In Kazakhstan, Young found the nation focused more heavily on AI. The gap sent her digging into the differences in how countries and regions are investing in different emerging technologies, work she now plans to fold into her teaching. 

It's also changed how she talks about her research to people outside her field: Viewing her specialty through an unfamiliar institutional lens, she says, has made it easier to talk about with people who don't already know its language and value propositions.

International experience has been a thread through Young’s career. Years ago, an award from the premier international research funding program created by the European Union, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (colloquially a “Marie Curie Fellowship”), took her to the Netherlands for several years of work that she says has shaped her career ever since. Ever since, she’s encouraged students — at NKU as well as the U of A — to see the career value of international and cross-cultural education, not least of all for how employers and others perceive it. 

When you venture far beyond your home turf, she says, "people know that you're willing to take chances, take opportunities, that you want to work with different people." 

At the same time, she notes that her own international experiences have taught her that people everywhere are more alike than different. While the same is true of college students, whether their home classroom is in Tucson or Petropavlovsk, she adds that as a teacher, there’s no better way to understand your students, down to something as routine as the daily logistics of simply getting to campus. “You don't really know what their world is like until you experience it yourself."