NSCC in Colombia day 2

We are very lucky on this trip to Bogota to have help from our colleague Jos Nolle, the International Director at Niagara College who is on secondment to the Association of Canadian Community Colleges Education for Employment (EFE) project in Colombia for a year. Jos is well known to many in the international education field in Canada and has been working with partners in South America for many years.

Jos has helped us set up meetings and network with several agencies and organizations in Bogota, and we thanked him by buying him lunch (as they say, no such thing as a free lunch!). Jos also shared alot of background on the EFE project, the education system and economic and political trends in Colombia and gave us some great advice on working with student exchange partners in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Thank you Jos! Jos has a great blog, and some good photos on what he is up to and you can also see what we had for lunch on his blog: http://josnolle.blogspot.com

Most of our visit in Bogota involved meetings to help us research opportunities for NSCC in Colombia, but we were also able to visit our new exchange partner university CESA in Bogota. CESA is a well respected business school, and we were able to meet with the Rector, several staff, visit the beautiful campus of older restored homes which have been equipped with modern equipment and even features a stock trading centre (students are given a project to invest College funds in the stock market each term! no pressure!). We also had the pleasure to meet Alejandra Rivera, a bright and outgoing student who has selected by CESA for an Canadian Government ELAP scholarship application to study for a semester at NSCC. Alejandra is very excited to come to NSCC, and we hope she is awarded the scholarship!

Our partnership discussions with CESA began when International Director Eden Bolivar visited NSCC during the ELAP mission last fall. I asked her about her impressions of NSCC from that visit:

"The visit to Nova Scotia Community College was very fruitful and very well organized. I had the chance to see that Community Colleges in Canada have very good infrastructure facilities and offer very high quality programs. Usually in developing countries like Colombia, some students think that the programs offered by Community Colleges are inferior to those offered by universities. This visit allowed me to have more information that I could relay to our students.
The presentation done by NSCC was very interesting and I learned that articulation agreements exist between community colleges and universities giving students different pathways to develop professionally. Lunch was superb and the visit to the culinary arts was fun and interesting"

We are just getting accustomed to lively Bogota but it is already time to leave... Next stop: Arequipa, Peru

- Katie Orr
Director, NSCC International