Duke University is committed to providing an undergraduate education with a truly global perspective. All of us live in a world of increasingly interdependent nations and cultures, and you must be prepared to live and work in an international environment. While you can prepare in part through academic study and open debate at your home college, nothing can match direct experience.

An extended encounter with a foreign culture's different values and languages can teach us how to communicate across the barriers of custom, geography, and politics. Students who have studied abroad return with a deeper understanding of other peoples, of their own cultural background, of themselves, and of their place in the world.