By Alexis Lee
The Bush School of Government and Public Service recently welcomed a new Director of International and High-impact Experiences, Dr. Cory Arcak. Arcak is the first to take on the new position, which was created last school year to support the impactful experiences Bush School students already engage in informally, and increase opportunities for formal engagement in these activities.
The Director of International and High Impact Experiences is responsible for identifying, developing, directing, creating, and assessing international, study abroad, and high-impact experiences. These experiences may include internships, language immersion opportunities, service projects, and travel.
Arcak describes the variety of high-impact experiences available to students:
“a high impact experience can be research, or it can be travel abroad, it can be participating in a dynamic experience in your own community. It’s not so much what it is, it’s how you engage in it…and being able to go to other communities and learn other cultures, and different languages and what that does to you as an individual and a contributor to our global society.”
Arcak understands the value of high-impact experiences from one of her own, an internship that brought her to Texas A&M. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Texas A&M University at Kingsville, she interned in a conservation lab studying shipwreck and nautical archaeology.
“It was an internship that actually brought me to Texas A&M University between my bachelor’s and my graduate program,” Arcak says, “it was such a dynamic experience, and I was touching history, and I was contributing to other people being able to have access to that history.”
The internship inspired Arcak to stay at Texas A&M and obtain her Ph.D. in education, after which she served in several student supportive roles at the university. More recently, Arcak served as the director of the MSC L.T. Jordan Institute for International Awareness at Texas A&M, and as an associate director at the MSC Student Programs Office.
Arcak is passionate about providing resources and opportunities for students at Texas A&M. She described her hopes for the new role:
“This role is brand new at the Bush School… right now, the slate is wide open and we can do nearly anything that we want to do…We’re building internships, we’re building study abroad, we’re building research opportunities… It’s really a wonderful opportunity to provide these students with study abroad that they can afford. Affordable access to their education, as well as dynamic opportunities in internship realms that they might not have realized were there in the first place, so they can learn those skills that they need to go out and be productive citizens of the world.”
