The trip to Poland was Milostan’s first significant international adventure, which paved the way for many more. His mother and most of her family immigrated to the United States from Poland in the 1960’s, and he still has several family members living in Poland, so the connection remains strong.

As an undergraduate at Michigan State University, Milostan wished to study the Polish language, but the university’s sole professor for that language was on leave. Having struggled with Spanish in high school, Milostan decided to give Italian a try. Milostan found Italian to be just as troublesome as Spanish, so in a valiant effort to expand and improve his language skills, he enrolled in MSU’s Italian language and culture study abroad program in Florence, Italy. The trip was a rich, language-immersion experience, in which Milostan greatly increased his proficiency. Rather than being satisfied to have completed a study abroad program, Milostan returned to the states eager to gain more international experiences. Milostan immediately began thinking about ways he could live overseas for an extended period of time.

During his final semester at MSU, Milostan attended an international career fair in search of post-graduation overseas opportunities. He discovered an organization looking for English-language teaching assistants for schools in Northern Italy. Milostan applied and was accepted for a six-month program in Turin, Italy. A few weeks before departure, the organization went bankrupt and Milostan’s trip was cancelled. Initially distraught, Milostan began looking for another good reason to cross the Atlantic and ultimately headed to Spain on his own.

When Milostan arrived in Madrid he enrolled in a Teach-English-as-a-Foreign-Language course and earned certification. He immediately found work as a business English teacher and stayed in Madrid for almost two years. He arrived in Spain with just two years of high-school Spanish under his belt, which made life very difficult in the beginning, because he was forced to communicate almost entirely in Spanish. He eventually picked up Spanish and was close to fluency when he returned to the states.

Milostan enrolled in a graduate program when he returned to the states at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont to earn a master’s degree in international education. He chose the school because it is highly regarded in the international education field and because the program required one year of practical experience. Milostan learned much in the courses he took at SIT, which focused on international education, conflict transformation, intercultural communication and Spanish, but he learned even more from his nearly 200 classmates, of whom about 30 percent were international students. Milostan’s dorm was very diverse, with dorm mates from Kenya, Japan, India, and Ethiopia. As a requirement of his SIT degree program, in 2008 Joe sought an internship in a study abroad office offering a broad range of programs, and he landed one in WMU’s Haenicke Institute for Global Education Study Abroad office.

Milostan began his position as study abroad outreach intern in summer 2008, assigned responsibility for coordinating and delivering outreach initiatives on and off campus, including classroom presentations and two study/work abroad fairs. WMU’s fall fair featured more than 60 display tables and attracted more than 600 students. Milostan also planned and facilitated a business abroad fair in the Haworth College of Business in January that provided information about business-specific overseas opportunities for about 100 students.

The internship, which concludes in mid-May, offered Milostan the opportunity to learn on the job among a staff of seasoned study abroad professionals and gave him a focus for the capstone project required by his master’s program at SIT, in which he is considering how higher education institutions can provide academic support for internships abroad. Milostan returns to Vermont in August 2009 to present his capstone to a panel of faculty at SIT. With his master’s degree in hand, he’ll pursue the career of his dreams serving the field of international education.