Day 5 - Wednesday, April 14th

Our last day in Washington, DC was very busy. We had our second round of Best Practices Presentations, and I had my presentation on "Effective and Innovative Ways to Promote your Center". I really enjoyed working on this presentation. Even though it was a short presentation 6-8 minutes, I spent some hours trying to get as much information as I could and that would benefit my colleagues. In addition to exploring the powerpoint resources. In Brazil, we have been working hard on promoting the EducationUSA, and we have been developing a lot of materials to get the word out.


I think the Best Practices Presentations are really good and we learn so much! The other presenters shared them experiences with "Interacting with Semester Abroad Students", "Interacting with American Study Abroad Students", "Intern Program", "Increasing Visibility Using Innovative Tools", "Specialized Sessions", "Time Management Tools", and "Effective Collaboration with the U.S. Embassy.

After the presentations, we had representatives from TOEFL & GRE, SAT, ACT, GMAT, and LSAC talking about the testing program updates. The conversation continued through lunch time. And then, it was time to get our luggage and go to our campus cluster. We are 20 advisers, and we were divided to go to the following clusters: New Jersey, Mississippi, Nebraska, and Kansas. I went to the New Jersey cluster, and we went from Washington DC to New Jersey by train. It was quite an interesting experience. After putting all our heavy luggage on the train and sit downs, we were advised that there was a problem with our train. Finally after almost an hours, we were told that our train would not depart, and we could take another train that was departing in 15 minutes. There we went, five of us, getting our heavy luggage again and running to catch the next train. But at the end, we made it to New Jersey, and Nancy from Rutgers was there waiting for us, and she took us to the hotel. I don't need to tell you that we were starving...but we found a very nice Mexican restaurant close to the hotel. :)