Chile connects with Kwantlen - Kwantlen Chronicle

Some lucky Kwantlenites will soon be boarding flights for an exotic South American country.

An agreement has been signed between the presidents of Kwantlen University College and Chile’s Universidad Arturo Prat (UNAP), marking the beginnings of an exchange program that officials hope will offer new and different learning opportunities abroad for both faculty and students.

“Exchange programs are a very exciting opportunity,” says Peter Chevrier, Kwantlen’s director of marketing and communications. Students and faculty going to Chile will come back having had a rewarding cultural experience, he says.

Not only does this exchange enrich the lives of those travelling, but it also enriches Kwantlen and its surrounding community as well, says Chevrier.

With an exchange program such as this, the trading of research knowledge can serve as a treasure for the institutes involved. “In Kwantlen’s case, our research is very community focused,” says Chevrier, and if UNAP can offer knowledge that Kwantlen can contribute back to the community, then it’s a success on that level, too.

Another benefit of the exchange program is that it can help both institutions with international-student recruitment, notes Chevrier, “which is always a positive thing.”

All of this was made possible when Kwantlen instructor Patricio Ramirez took a one-year educational leave in 2002 to teach chemistry to the students, and English to the faculty, at UNAP.

Ramirez, who was born in Temuco, Chile, went back for a school reunion and met someone who helped him get the ball rolling with UNAP, which has a campus about 40 kilometres away in Victoria, a small city in one of the country’s agricultural regions. Victoria is close to Santiago, the country’s capital.

Like Kwantlen, UNAP has more than one campus – its other being in Iquique, a picturesque, beach-side city of about 200,000 people, located 2,000 kilometres to the north. “The back yard of the university is the Pacific Ocean,” Ramirez says appreciatively. “It’s beautiful.”

According to Ramirez, Iquique is where the heart of the university really is and where the exchange is likely to set most of its roots.

Because of an agricultural focus at UNAP and Kwantlen’s available programs, horticulture will be one of the main focuses for the exchange, along with criminology, Spanish and English.

One of the more interesting horticultural efforts coming from the Iquique campus is something called Project Desert Green. “They are doing research in the area of growing plants in the desert that otherwise wouldn’t grow anywhere else,” says Remirez.

Kwantlen and UNAP are presently in the planning phase, determining how many student and faculty exchanges will be offered, what joint research opportunities to undertake and how to get the most out of the chosen programs.

For Ramirez, seeing this program take off has been an extremely rewarding experience. “It’s always been one of my objectives to promote study abroad,” says Ramirez.

Travelling to Chile would be a great cultural experience for Kwantlen students and faculty, says Ramirez. “One of the things that has not been explored so much, and which has so much to learn from it, is the Latin American culture.”

Besides the more obvious benefits of the exchange, UNAP hopes to gain insight from its Canadian counter part that will help to improve its general ability to provide training geared towards employment markets that are both regional and international, according to a Kwantlen press release.