International & Global Studies Major
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About the Major
This major combines a broad knowledge of international and global affairs with the focused study of one region of the world. Balancing study abroad experiences, foreign language study and other Elon coursework, the program fosters an understanding of emerging global issues along with respect and appreciation for other peoples and cultures.
Jobs in International & Global Studies
- Foreign service officer/diplomat
- Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) coordinator
- Journalist/cultural specialist
- Foreign affairs analyst
- Congressional aide
Past Elon International & Global Studies Internships
- Center for Democratic Development
- Oxfam
- Library of Congress
- U.S. Department of Defense, Office of Inspector General
- Center for New North Carolinians at UNCG
Related Majors
Undergraduate research and global fieldwork gave Lumen Scholar ‘life-changing’ opportunities
Just three months after graduating from Elon in 2023, Natalie Triche found herself back in Morocco — a place where she had studied abroad years earlier as a double major in international and global studies and religious studies.
This time, however, Triche was in the North African country as a Fulbright research student, an accomplishment she credits to the unique opportunities Elon gave her traveling the world and learning from the university’s experts in fieldwork research.
The research experiences at Elon are often long-term, not just a semester long for many students. It taught me everything I know. I felt transformed from research.
“The international travel and experience to do research is really unique for any undergraduate student, especially to do so independently, that’s very unique to Elon,” she said. “And getting to travel abroad alone, getting to travel for study abroad, it’s a cliché, but it’s really life-changing.”
During her four years at Elon, Triche studied abroad twice — in Morocco for a semester and in India for a January term — and she traveled to Egypt twice for her research on the rise of authoritarianism following the Arab Spring, a project funded by Elon’s prestigious Lumen scholarship.
The path that brought her overseas was an unexpected one for Triche, who declared political science as her major when she first entered Elon in 2019. But one class during her freshman year changed her trajectory.
As part of Elon’s core curriculum, every student must take a first-year seminar on the global experience, but because each professor selects the focus of their course, topics vary. Triche ended up in a class about Sept. 11, the events leading up to it and the fallout from it. And she became entranced by the lessons on the Middle East and North Africa.
“I feel like in K-12 in the U.S. you don’t really study the Middle East at all,” she said. “I sort of decided to jump into something I really knew nothing about, and I loved it immediately.”
Triche dove into research, ultimately spending two and a half years with her mentor, Professor Brian Pennington, on an independent research project on secularism in Egypt. That research, she said, made her fall in love with the process of learning.
“The research experiences at Elon are often long-term, not just a semester long for many students,” she said. “It taught me everything I know. I felt transformed from research.”
Elon, Triche said, gave her priceless experiences, including being able to watch how her professors conducted their own research in the field. During a weeklong field-method training course in Israel and Palestine, she was able to witness how experienced researchers operated in the field. “I received hands-on training from professors at Elon, which absolutely shapes how I engage with my research today in Morocco.”
She watched as one of them, whose research is on children’s experiences in refugee camps in the West Bank, spoke to locals with a perfect dialect while embodying some of the local communication traits, such as touching his chest when saying thank you. When she was studying abroad in India, she was particularly excited when seeing how, even after decades of research, the professors still got excited by their research.
“Even though my professors have been going (to India) for 25-plus years, they remain curious every day,” she said. “Seeing other people be curious is really inspirational.”
Learning from scholars in the field helped Triche as she conducted research as part of the Lumen Prize — Elon’s top research award that provides 15 rising juniors with $20,000 to advance their undergraduate research projects.
In June 2022, during one of her trips to Egypt for that research, Triche found herself alone in Cairo looking to speak with Egyptians on the rise of authoritarianism following the Arab Spring. The same authoritarian framework made it near impossible to speak openly with locals, and Triche found she’d have to pivot the scope of her research.
“In my head, I was going to Egypt to talk to people and learn their stories and how their identities have been shaped 10 years after the Arab Spring,” she said. “But you can’t really talk about the government publicly in Egypt, and my project was all about that.”
So Triche shifted, turning her focus to participant observations and structured conversations to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. The objective of the research remained the same as Triche sought to gain an understanding of Egyptian secularism and nationalism.
Now, back in Morocco for her Fulbright research, she continues to use the lessons learned at Elon as she investigates how the implementation of Article 19 of the post-Arab Spring Moroccan constitution has impacted the daily lives and practices of women.
Part of that research includes interviewing Moroccan women, which she will do on her own, having taken four years of Arabic. That knowledge of the language has been invaluable to her research, and she encourages students who are looking to major in international and global studies to commit to language study.
“In international studies, language study opens a lot of doors, whether it’s through State Department scholarships that look for students who know language or when studying abroad somewhere,” she said. “You’ll get a lot more out of the experience if you can speak the local language.”
Did You Know?
- International and global studies majors take courses focused on global studies and on one region of the world. Most students elect to concentrate on one of five regions — Africa, Asia/Pacific, the Middle East, Europe or Latin America — although students and their advisers can develop coursework in other regions of the world.
- An integral part of the curriculum is the opportunity to study abroad, which students are required to do for one semester. Elon offers students approximately 80 semester-abroad options, including China, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, England, Jordan and Tanzania. Students are encouraged to study abroad in the region that fits with their concentration.
- Students regularly participate in Elon’s annual Spring Undergraduate Research Forum, collaborating with faculty mentors to design, develop and complete projects. One student helped conduct research and translated German documents for his professor’s authoritative biography of Oskar Schindler.