GradTrain is crowdfunding on indiegogo!! Back GradTrain and spread the word!

If you were wondering what we have been working on for the past months, here is the answer:

We are five friends from 5 different countries. We all share one important characteristic: we are passionate about international higher education. Studying abroad changed our lives for the better; not only did it help kick off and shape our careers, but it is now also an undeniable part of our identity.  That is what GradTrain is all about!

GradTrain is the first international web platform designed for people who want to attend graduate school in another country (no matter where they are coming from or where they are going to). GradTrain provides meaningful guidance from people who are what you want to be in a few years. People who understand your background, language and culture, and really care about providing you with the information that is relevant for your success.

We are building an online platform that will:

• Connect prospective students with coaches who share a similar background to theirs who have been through the application process and can guide them to fulfill their potential.

• Provide sophisticated algorithm-based decision making tools that will help students make decisions based on data on not on gut feelings.
• Ultimately revolutionize the field of international education, by minimizing the information gaps that currently exist, allowing students and universities to find the right match for them.

Based on our vision, we want our first funding to be based on the power of the internet to mobilize people across the globe, to create a community and to increase the opportunity of many individuals to participate in a solution to a problem. We have thus decided to launch a Crowdfunding camapaign (what’s this?). This will also be a commitment vehicle to achieving our social goals.

“Crowdfunding democratizes start-up investment just as GradTrain aims to democratize the international education process”, says Jacob Bacon, a Former advisor at the United Nations and a GradTrain co-founder. “Building a community of friends and total strangers that come together and help each other because they have common goals and interests, is what GradTrain is all about.”

We need your help in making this dream a reality!

Back GradTrain on indiegogo and share the link to our campaign: http://igg.me/at/gradtrain

Visit www.gradtrain.com for more information and ways to share the campaign.

Truly yours,

The GradTrain team

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Research in the Humanities – the added value of international study

Thinking of studying abroad in the field of Humanities? Considering History, Philosophy, Languages, Cultural Studies or Literature? This week we are happy to host a guest blog by Prof. Gershon Bacon, a Historian from Bar-Ilan University (Israel), who explains the importance of international exposure in this field.
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Let me sketch out a typical week in the past month: on Sunday, a colleague in Poland sent me a request to help chair an international workshop for graduate students from Israel and Poland to be held next June in Wrocław, and asked me to recruit appropriate graduate students for the workshop. On Monday I received an email from a major Slavic studies journal in the United States asking if I would review a new book (by coincidence, by the Polish colleague who had written me the day before).  On Tuesday a graduate student from England sent me a series of questions related to her doctoral thesis.  On Wednesday I contacted a colleague in Budapest to set up a time to meet during my planned visit to Hungary.  On Thursday I exchanged articles with a colleague in the States as part of keeping up to date on matters of mutual interest.

The point of this catalog is not to show how busy my week can be, but rather to illustrate that in my field of history and, I am sure, in most areas of the humanities, our enterprise has become a truly international ongoing conversation, and not just limited to conferences once or twice a year. 

Our research too takes place in an ever-expanding international arena, made possible of course by the Internet.  Again, during a typical week I might consult a number of databases based in Europe, such as Europeana or the sites of major university libraries in Poland or Germany.

Even as more and more of the world's scholars and databases can be accessed from the convenience of one's own desktop, for those of us in the humanities there is still no substitute for direct exposure to the subjects of our research and to colleagues engaged in similar ventures. Sustained hands-on contact with the sights, sounds, language and culture of our specialized fields of interest is a desired experience for making us better scholars, and certainly increases our value in the scholarly market.

Gaining this international exposure, however, demands careful planning and good advice. When is the best stage to travel abroad for intensive, full-immersion language study? What are the best places for such study? The attendant costs? Where are the best institutions for graduate study in one's field? Is it advisable in one's field to do a doctorate abroad and an MA in one's home country, or perhaps the opposite? Is it better to seek out an English-language course of study abroad or is study in the local language preferable? These are but a few of the complex issues that need to be addressed.  Only through the best kind of guidance, from people who have undergone this process and know the challenges and also the opportunities inherent in international study can one achieve one's goals in the optimal manner.

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Feel free to sign up to this blog for updates. For specific questions on your desired field of study please visit www.GradTrain.com or email us at info@gradtrain.com

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