Talk about jumping into the deep end. Dana Fager was having the time of her life, immersing herself in the Japanese language and culture in Kobe, Japan, during her sophomore year at Illinois. But when a friend signed her up to learn how to scuba dive in the ocean, her language skills were put to the test in a big way. The crash course on how to safely scuba dive was given entirely in Japanese.
“You have to be careful in scuba diving, so I’m listening to this explanation and hoping I understood it all and knowing that I probably didn’t,” Fager says. “The next thing I knew I was scuba diving, and it was so much fun. I would never have done this in the United States, but I was already out of my comfort zone in a new country, so I decided, ‘Why not?’”
Fager, a senior in international studies, has plenty of experience traveling out of her comfort zone, for she has thrown herself into international studies as both a study abroad student and a peer advisor for other students thinking about studying in another country. She is also this year’s recipient of the Illinois International Undergraduate Achievement Award.
Her first taste of foreign travel came during her senior year of high school in Oak Park, going to Japan for five weeks. After high school, she spent a year in Israel before enrolling at the University of Illinois, where she took courses in Japanese and later became actively involved in the study abroad program. In addition to returning to Japan for her sophomore year, she became a peer advisor as a senior, putting in eight to 10 hours per week meeting with students who are considering international study.
As a peer advisor, she is also part of a team of 10 that does presentations in various classrooms on the study abroad program, reaching up to a thousand students every week. What’s more, for three months in the spring of 2011, she and five other students promoted a successful referendum to renew the Illinois for Illinois Scholarship, which helps students who would like to study abroad.
As if that isn’t enough, Fager serves as an executive board member for the International Illini, an organization that pairs study abroad returnees on campus with foreign exchange students to help them adjust. The International Illini also set up numerous social activities, ranging from pumpkin carving to camping trips.
Fager likes the idea of helping exchange students at Illinois because she knows how tricky it can be navigating a new culture. When she was in Japan as a sophomore, her language instructor suggested a project in which the class would create a newspaper in Japanese. Fager knew the class preferred to work on their oral language skills, rather than their writing skills, but in Japanese culture you are not supposed to state such feelings directly. So she had to learn how to carefully and politely suggest to the teacher that instead of creating a newspaper, perhaps they could film a Star Wars parody in Japanese as a way to hone their oral language skills.
Because of another cultural norm in Japan—consensus decision-making—the teacher could not approve such an idea on the spot but had to seek agreement from other teachers and her supervisor. Three days later, the Star Wars parody got the green light, and Fager found herself playing the role of a Japanese-speaking Princess Leia in a galaxy far, far away.
“When you’re in another country speaking another language for the first time, or if you’re doing an internship in an office where cultural norms are completely different, it shows you have global competencies,” she points out. “And that’s a really valuable experience.”
