BOSTON — Every year more than a quarter of a million American college students head out to see the world through a study abroad program.

These programs, which are growing steadily every year, introduce young people to new cultures, new languages, new ways of thinking and a new sense of perspective on their own country.

GlobalPost believes the next generation of foreign correspondents will likely emerge out of this group of students who seek to learn abroad.

And so, GlobalPost is proud to launch a new “Study Abroad” page which will draw on these students to provide reported stories, essays, blogs, photo galleries and videos. They will form what we are calling the “GlobalPost Student Correspondent Corps.”

This team is made up of more than 70 young people who have demonstrated an interest in student journalism or who have a facility for story telling and a desire to try their hand at being a foreign correspondent.

We sorted through literally hundreds of applications from American students over the last few months to pull together this Student Correspondent Corps and we are excited to see them head out on their journeys to every corner of the world to become eyes and ears for GlobalPost and for you our visitors to the site.

They will not cover big stories or hard news. We’ll leave that to our team of 75 GlobalPost correspondents in more than 50 countries who make up a stellar team of professional, seasoned journalists. But these student correspondents will be reporters-in-training who will seek out stories that provide us a student perspective about life and culture in the countries in which they are studying.

They hail from campuses across the country, including Tufts, Boston University, Harvard University, University of Missouri, University of Wisconsin, University of Texas, Northwestern, Duke, New York University, Swarthmore, and many others.

Some of these students want to be journalists, others diplomats, business leaders or human rights advocates. They are drawn to politics and the arts and sports and climate change.

But all of them share a passion for going out into the world and sending home stories that enlighten and inform about the world they are seeing. We’ve asked them to share experiences that change the way they think about their host country or their home country or perhaps themselves.

They write from Cuba, where Gracie Jin ponders her life expectancy from the back of a car driven by a man sipping rum on dangerous roads. They write from Tibet, where Galen Murton paints a beautiful portrait of Lhasa. They write from Florence, where language is never a boundary to love. And they write about cultural paradoxes, such as former GlobalPost intern Elizabeth Tuttle’s essay from Brazil. With humor and insight, Tuttle focused on her dilemma over whether to relent to peer pressure over a controversial thread of fashion.

GlobalPost Newsroom Manager, Kathleen Struck, who has coordinated the project and who will be editing the page, said: “These students haven’t learned formulas or cliches or conventions they think you want to read or see. They report what they see and hear, often for the first time. The news doesn’t get any fresher than this.”

At a time when so many traditional print and television news organizations offer students few opportunities to get started in the craft of journalism, GlobalPost is proud to create what we hope will be a new path for student journalists to become foreign correspondents in the digital age.

My hope for this new corner of GlobalPost grows out of my own college experience. I did my junior year abroad in Madrid, Spain, where I ended up as an intern at Radio Nacional de Espana translating news briefs and weather reports. It offered me a chance to see Spain from the perch of a newsroom in 1983 at a time when the country was just coming out from under the shadow of Franciso Franco. It was a life changing experience, and my first, small taste of what it would be like to be a foreign correspondent, which I still think is the greatest job in the world. 

GlobalPost's Student Correspondent Corps is part of a project to train the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/study-abroad/091011/planting-the-seed-journalisms-next-generation