A Small World
In light of globalization, international exchanges open up wider professional prospects and help the people involved acquire the vision of citizens of the world. But what U.S. organizations help facilitate international exchanges?
The Institute of International Education, an independent non-profit organization founded in 1919, is a world leader in the exchange of people and ideas. It administers more than 200 programs, including the Fulbright Program, serving 20,000 individuals each year. The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government's flagship international educational exchange program. Its mission was well-formulated by its founder, Sen. J. William Fulbright: "mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world." The Fulbright Program has provided 300,000 participants with the chance to study, teach and conduct research; exchange ideas; and help find solutions to shared international concerns.
The key word is "mutual," which is often overlooked in reports and papers written after an individual exchange program. Typically, program coordinators focus on organizational points, or international students or scholars who describe their experiences through the prism of their own perception. What is often ignored is the experience that the hosting party acquires through the viewpoint of those who closely interact with the exchange student.
In this interview, an attempt is made to look at a specific exchange experience from both sides: Tatiana Sofronova, a Fulbright visiting student researcher from Siberia, and Dr. Kevin Ryan, a research fire ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. Sofronova teaches ecology and English at the Astafiev Krasnoyarsk State Pedagogical University, and she conducts research at the Sukachev Institute of Forest in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Ryan works at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, Missoula (Mont.) Fire Science Laboratory.
What educational value have you gained as a result of this exchange?
Sofronova: I was exposed to diverse educational experiences from learning to live in a foreign country to learning through attending seminars, workshops, professional meetings (e.g., Society of American Foresters) and educational courses. My plunge into U.S. fire science started the week I arrived, owing to the weekly Fire Science Seminar Series at the Missoula Fire Lab. The seminars covered a broad range of topics, from ecology to safety and management. They provided an excellent opportunity to learn about current research, to get feedback from different specialists and to find common interests with other scientists. Such seminars would be very valuable to scientists, particularly graduate students at the Sukachev Institute of Forest and universities.
I was pleased to discover the high degree of flexibility in the U.S. university system. Students have much greater latitude to take courses outside of their primary discipline, thus increasing the opportunity to bring fresh ideas into one's work. In contrast, the Russian system of education is more rigid. Starting in high school and continuing through the university, one is fairly confined by a chosen profession.
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For example, the Russian system expects that, by the time a student receives the equivalent of a master's degree, he or she has completed all developmental stages in the chosen specialization and is prepared to pursue a Ph.D. through independent study. Thus, Ph.D. studies in Russia differ a lot from the ones at U.S. universities. Students mainly self-educate in a narrow topic; they are not offered graduate courses to improve their qualifications, nor do they have the opportunity to interact with fellow graduate students in shared learning. They, therefore, sometimes fail to develop up-to-date skills and interdisciplinary vision of current issues. In addition, library resources are limited primarily to Russian-language documents, and online access to international libraries and journals is negligible.
Much broader opportunities open up for U.S. students. Realization of this inspired me to apply for Ph.D. studies in the United States. This experience is very important for me because my career goal is teaching and research in an academic setting.
During my Fulbright scientific training in ecology at the University of Montana's College of Forestry and Conservation, in cooperation with the Missoula Fire Lab, my thirst for knowledge was satisfied through seminars, professional discussions, and computer and field training. Through the university, I participated in lectures and seminars and in the college's forestry measurements field camp at the Lubrecht Experimental Forest. Training through the Forest Service included the Fire Effects course (Rx-310) at the Northern Rockies Training Center and the USFS Region 1 and 4 Fire Guard School at the Trapper Creek Job Corps Center in Montana. The latter included fundamentals in fire, with the courses I-100 (Introduction to Incident Command System), L-180 (Human Factors on the Fireline), S-130 (Firefighter Training) and S-190 (Introduction to Wildland Fire Behavior).
The capstone of my fire training was the Geospatial Fire Analysis (S-495) course in Sacramento, Calif., a 140-hour landscape fire-analysis course designed for strategic and tactical fire planning. It was offered for the first time in 2009, and I was fortunate to be one of 56 students to attend. This course provides valuable knowledge for resolving wildland fire problems at multiple spatial and administrative levels. In contrast, Russia still has no national fire behavior prediction system to guide policy and planning. Likewise, Russia lags behind the United States in the development of formalized fire training, and such training as it does exist traditionally has been an exclusively male domain.
As a university assistant professor, I collaborate with a fire science team from the Sukachev Institute of Forest, a leading scientific institution in the field of fire science in Russia. We conduct field and laboratory experiments in vegetation and fuel mapping, fire behavior and fire effects, as well as teach fire science at universities. The knowledge and skills obtained during my training, in addition to my planned Ph.D. studies in the United States, will position me to lead scientific efforts to develop improved fire prediction systems that can be integrated into all aspects of resource management.
It is my goal to use advanced studies of geography with an ecological emphasis in the field of fire science to map fuels and vegetation in Russia. This requires mastering the basics for processing and application of satellite-based, remote-sensing technology. I hope to create vegetation fuel databases for the whole of Russia, similar to ones created through the LANDFIRE Project at www.landfire.gov.
Ryan: For me the educational value of Tatiana's visit has been to learn more about the ecology and the role of fire in the Russian Taiga (boreal forests). Roughly 70% of the world's coniferous forests are in Russia. Much of this forest grows over permafrost, often with deep peat soils. It is estimated that 25% of the world's terrestrial carbon is stored in the forests and soils of Russia. Also, the Russian permafrost traps large amounts of methane. Methane is about 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Rapid development along with global warming projections suggests that this region of the world will experience major changes in fire regimes, with significant implications to the global greenhouse gas issue. Tatiana's knowledge of the fire ecology of the taiga and her outstanding language skills provided me with a greater understanding of the ecology and management of this region of the world.
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