JTC 24: All Abroad!

Misa Fujinuma likes distinctive cultures: That is how she came to pursue a master's in higher education at the University of Mississippi, almost 7,000 miles from her hometown in Nagoya, Japan.

"I love it when you go somewhere and you know there's only one place you could be," Fujinuma said. "That's the South."

"Southerners have their own sayings, their own food, hospitality and a distinctive pride."

That pride, mixed with a willingness to face challenging parts of history, impressed Fujinuma when she arrived at Ole Miss.

"In many cultures, there is a politeness or reticence about difficult subjects," she said. "The history here on the UM campus, I was totally ignorant of before coming here.

"It's interesting to see an institution openly grapple with their past to build something better."

Fujinuma wishes that all students could have this same exposure to different cultures, customs and traditions. It was precisely this wish that propelled her to study higher education with the goal of learning to facilitate successful study abroad and exchange programs for college students.

Fujinuma first experienced international study as an undergraduate at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies. She left Japan's fourth-largest city to participate in an exchange program that sent her to the University of Pikeville in Kentucky: population 5,000.

"I fell in love with the experience, but I noticed that some didn't," she said. "They didn't make friends as easily or they retreated into groups of people from similar backgrounds.

"I wanted to know how I could make it better so that others felt prepared to take a chance on local experiences and events and make new friends."

After undergrad, Fujinuma returned to Nagoya, this time to the School of Global Governance and Collaboration, overseeing a study abroad program that sent Japanese students to Australia. She and a co-worker created a prep course that helped students set goals for their travel.

"I saw that it gave students a sense of agency and gave them something to work towards while also tempering expectations," Fujinuma said. "Before we created the course, they would just write an essay that said what the teacher wanted to hear.

"Our course gave students a space to explore what they wanted out of the experience and figure out concrete ways to get there."

Fujinuma enjoyed enabling study abroad experiences but wanted more structured, theoretical knowledge about education and student development to guide her. Because higher education is a more developed field of study in the United States and Fujinuma had already fallen in love with the South, she turned her eyes to Ole Miss and a scholarship group called ALLEX, which connects students to a university in need of Japanese instructors.

She taught at the Japanese Supplementary School on campus, teaching Japanese material to fifth- and sixth-grade students who are here for a couple years due to their parents' jobs, so that when they return to Japan, they have an easier transition.

Fujinuma appreciates the way that American colleges consider community support and access when planning curriculum, programs and outreach.

"In Japan, when you talk about going to university, the first thing people think is 'What is the ranking?' 'How difficult is it to get in?' 'Are you a smart person?'" she said. "The questions, 'Does the community have access to education?' 'Is the education serving the community?' are not really there."

Fujinuma has worked closely with Ty McNamee, assistant professor of higher education, whose research focuses on college access for underrepresented students, including those from rural areas and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

"Misa was an excellent, thoughtful student, with an innate ability to conduct rigorous research about racial identity development of Japanese international students in higher education," McNamee said. "This work is extremely important and expanded my own thinking about postsecondary student identity development."

Fujinuma will return to Japan after graduation and hopes to work a few more years in higher education before deciding whether to pursue a doctorate in the field. Meanwhile, she will continue to develop her research on the history of the internationalization of Ole Miss as well as her research on racial identity development and cultural adaptation of Japanese international students at the university.

"I want to help students see their international experience as being like the 'hero's journey,' something with archetypal setbacks that everyone goes through and can overcome," Fujinuma said.

"I don't want students to get stuck and think, 'This dog won't hunt.' Isn't that expression poetic? I picked it up down South."

Fujinuma's use of colloquialism is a direct reflection of one of the things she gained through her personal experiences.

"I thought I could 'travel' through the internet," she said. "There is nothing you can't google. But sometimes, especially a gesture, a custom or an expression, you don't even know there is something to google until you have experienced it.

"You have to be there, and it has to move through you."

See more photos from Misa Fujinuma's Journey to Commencement