At Union University, the Study Abroad program is primarily run by one woman, Victoria Malone. Thanks to her expertise, students that attend Union University can study almost anywhere in the world. She is involved in all intricacies of study abroad and has made the program what it is today.
When she was 17, Malone went on a study abroad trip to France and attended high school in a town near the German border. When she returned to the United States, she had a newfound love for international travel. Her experiences abroad had thrown her into the deep end when it came to figuring out her relationship with Christ and with herself as a person. For the first time in her life, she felt like she was her own person and that her relationship with Christ was individual and personal. She found a new way to see the world.
“I had to figure out who I was in this relationship with Christ,” Malone said. “I had to have my own relationship. I couldn’t depend on my parents or the people at church.”
Before her trip to France, she did not know what she wanted to major in or what she wanted to do with her life, but by the end of her time overseas, she was certain that she wanted to do something involving French. Malone graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in French with a minor in international relations from Northern Illinois University, and continued at NIU to earn both a Master’s in modern European history and in nineteenth-century French literature.
While she was attending university, Malone lived on the floor that housed the Foreign Language Residence program, allowing her to spend time with people who had similar interests and kept her engaged with the idea of being a “global citizen.” After she got married and had children, Malone became the coordinator for the Foreign Language Residence program at Northern Illinois University.
Malone found her way to Jackson when her husband, David Malone, was hired as an English professor for Union University. The French department was short a professor at the time, so Malone joined the language department as a faculty member.
“[Union] had nobody doing study abroad and Dr. Cynthia Jayne wanted to have more of an organized system for study abroad,” Professor Malone said. “There was a study tour going to Italy but there was no real infrastructure for individual students.”
So, in 2005, Malone was asked to take the job of Study Abroad Coordinator, a title that she has held ever since, making her the only Study Abroad Coordinator that Union University has ever had. Jayne has since left Union University, but her legacy lives on in the form of a scholarship for individual study abroad students.
In the 17 years that Malone has served as the Study Abroad Coordinator, she has developed a fine-tuned system for finding study programs for students to participate in.
“I have a list of minimum requirements for a partner,” said Malone.”We also do site visits to the different locations with our partners so I’ve kinda been all around the world.”
Each program must adhere to The Forum On Education Abroad code of ethics and meet the criteria that Malone has developed. Not only does a program have to meet Malone’s requirements, but it must meet the requirements of The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
“We look at everything. How they pick homestay families. What kind of excursions they go on,” Malone said. “They have to provide insurance for my students, so I have to go through insurance policies. It’s a lot of fun. I have gotten positive feedback from all of our trips so I feel very good about that.”
While most individual study abroad programs must jump through many hoops, the study tours that Union takes students on have far fewer hoops to conquer. These programs are led by Union faculty and use Union University curriculum. While still complicated to put together, they are a good choice for students who want to be among familiar faces when in an unfamiliar place.
Malone puts her heart and soul into making study abroad a fun and enjoyable experience for all the students that Union sends. If a program has slipped below her minimum requirements, Malone will not renew the affiliation agreements and will no longer allow students to study under that program.
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, all study abroad programs shut down. Every program, in every country, they all stopped. Union University went from sending over 200 students every year to barely shy of 100, as of 2021.
“In 2022, we are open for business to go just about anywhere in the world! But it takes time for people to have confidence in global travel after everything is shut down,” Malone said.
Now that the world is going back to being as it was before and confidence in global travel is growing, Malone is preparing for the number of students interested in taking a study abroad trip to skyrocket back to the numbers that they were before.
For those interested in learning more about study abroad, there will be a fall study abroad fair for Union University study tours in the SUB hallway on October 11th, from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. There will also be a table dedicated to study abroad as a whole where students can ask any questions about the individual trips. In the spring, there will be a larger event where representatives from some of the programs that Union University partners with will be there to promote their programs.