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Mike and Paula Nolan

I am sure many of you reading this will understand when I say that many of life’s key events are unplanned and unanticipated.

Such was the case with international work and me. Five years after coming to the University of Missouri as a faculty member I did not even possess a passport.

Five years after that I had accumulated over a million frequent flier miles and was actively involved in collaborative research in five countries scattered across the globe.

The opportunity I have had to work in so many different places is one of the highlights of my professional career and instilled in me a passion for wanting CAFNR students to have a similar experience during the period of their undergraduate studies.

When Dean Emeritus Roger Mitchell and I undertook an informal review of CAFNR’s international portfolio in the early 1990's we quickly realized that while we were engaged in a number of exciting international ventures, we had not given nearly enough attention to "internationalizing" ourselves - -specifically our faculty and students.

As a result, we embarked on several new initiatives including the development of study abroad programs specifically tailored to meet the interests of a broad cross section of CAFNR students.

One of the challenges of designing study abroad programs is making them affordable. In an era of rapidly escalating costs for college bound students, our goal was to design programs that would be no more costly than if a student had stayed on campus. Even at that we knew there would be other marginal costs (air tickets for example), which would have to be covered either by the student or through loans or scholarships.

Paula and I, having been bitten by the international bug, wanted to do what we could to provide a pool of funds for study abroad scholarships for CAFNR students to help offset the costs of participating in these educational experiences. Thus was born the idea of the Michael and Paula Nolan International Studies Scholarship.

The University of Missouri and CAFNR have been very good to us. In addition to allowing me to experience several different professional roles, we have had wonderful opportunities to extend the MU campus around the world.

While international travel by itself is a wonderful experience, we feel it is the relationships you build with people from different cultures that is the long term "high" from being internationally engaged. We count as friends people living in at least 10 different countries and somewhere in Africa there is a little girl (the daughter of a colleague and friend) who is named after Paula.

We owe much to MU and helping CAFNR students experience some of the same “highs” that we have seems like a small way for us to say thanks. We would urge you to consider doing something similar.