456 ■ III: ROLE FUNCTIONS OF DOCTORAL ADVANCED NURSING PRACTICE
Still, it takes an incredible amount of planning to put a high- level, scholarly pro-
gram together. The Drexel faculty were adamant to communicate that this program was
not a “vacation” but truly a study- abroad experience. Families were not even permitted
(of course as far as that could be enforced), until week 2 of the program, so students
could at least have 1 week where they could concentrate on themselves and this forma-
tive experience without the distractions of family obligations. A doctoral study- abroad
program requires meticulous planning to secure scholars to come to a new, foreign-
based doctoral seminar classroom. It requires months of networking and, indeed, the
program compensated the visiting classroom scholars with modest honoraria. The
faculty continuously debated to what extent this should be a “cultural immersion”
experience. The department chair tried to take the program to Madrid 1 year, but unfor-
tunately there was a scarcity of scholars fluent in English who could guest lecture on the
focused topics. A faculty scout (who was traveling nearby in Spain at the early planning
stages of the program for the following year) found the accommodations and suburban
location of the host school unacceptable. Indeed, graduate students, and particularly
doctoral students, will not want to be treated as undergraduates or thrown in with them
in the same type of accommodations. The majority of the Drexel students worked full
time, so they did typically have discretionary income that would allow them to pay
a little more for more upscale accommodations and amenities. The department chair
actually flew to Dublin to inspect the facilities (again, he was traveling nearby) and hav-
ing satisfactory accommodations for graduate students, even more so than “Spartan”
accommodations that undergraduates may not flinch at, became critically important
when returning students discussed their study- abroad program with students who had
just begun their program.
Finally, it was discerned that the amount of time necessary to plan such a program
required more time for graduate students than undergraduates. The Drexel MBA col-
leagues have also confirmed this. Therefore, one of the doctoral nursing faculty serves
as a study- abroad facilitator and works in concert with the chair each year to plan the
micro details of the program. The department chair has typically gone in the first year
of a new venue so the second- year experience can be highly fine tuned, but this is not
necessarily a permanent practice. But when a department chair is walking in Dublin
with a fellow faculty member who says, “Wow, I am so privileged to be here,” then the
expectations that these faculty will use their new international experiences to network,
collaborate, and ultimately increase their global scholarly reputations (and hence to the
college and university) become realized (and well worth the investment).
After many successful program years, the overall evaluation has been that this
mandatory international experience is an important and distinctive part of the DNP
program. If this model was used for PhD in nursing programs, PhD students could per-
haps be matched up with an international faculty mentor in the host city and have DNP
and PhD students share one course and take another separately. London and Dublin
have become excellent alternating sites, but in 2014 and 2015, students were sent to
Ontario, Canada with mixed success as the Canadian site was not deemed “an inter-
national destination” by the students. However, this overall experience suggests that a
short- term model could be easily replicated by international doctoral nursing students
coming to the United States and certainly for other U.S.- based doctoral nursing pro-
grams. With the rise of globalization, it is critical that nursing students, particularly
doctoral- educated clinical nursing scholars, have an enhanced understanding of inter-
national health issues. Participation in a mandatory study- abroad program for doctoral
nursing students is one way to accomplish this. So when the article “So What Did You
Learn in London” was republished on the Internet (Redden, 2007), it caught both the
students’ and faculty’s eyes, and the answer is, “a lot.”