By Lauren DiTullio, News Staff

President Joseph Aoun made an appearance in front of the Student Government Association (SGA) on Monday evening to talk about international co-op. Specifically, he said students aren’t doing enough of it.

“[International co-op] is something that we need to take more advantage of,” Aoun said. “The competition is no longer local. The competition is not national. The competition is global. That’s why we have been pushing and encouraging and growing international co-op.”

Aoun said there are currently more positions abroad than there are students applying to fill them.

“We need to reverse that. We need to have more demand than co-op opportunities [abroad],” he said.

SGA senator Arielle Newton, who works as an ambassador in the Office of International Study Programs, asked about the financial obstacles that bar some students from being able to study abroad. She said in her experience with giving presentations about going abroad, students generally tend to be concerned about the financial planning aspect of traveling.

Aoun said the university has taken steps to make going abroad more affordable for students.

“We took something called the presidential scholarships – scholarships that represent the priority of the president – and applied them to international co-op. My priority is for you to go explore the world, because that will position you well, because we are going to compete and work and collaborate with the world,” he said.

Formerly, the Presidential Scholarship was a full-tuition scholarship given to eight to 10 Northeastern students for their junior and senior years. Since fall 2009, it has gone to up to 200 students in grants up to $6,000 for a semester on co-op abroad, according to the Presidential Global Scholars Program website.

Following the meeting, Aoun said he plans to oversee the development of more financial aid options for students wishing to work abroad.

“Moving forward we will try to find every opportunity we can to increase the funding,” he said to The News.

Newton said she was pleased by Aoun’s goal to enable more funding to be granted to international co-op.

“I believe that President Aoun did a fantastic job addressing the concerns that I had with financing study abroad opportunities,” she said. “He was very candid about the fact that Northeastern is never satisfied about the amount of aid that that the university gives students who are interested in traveling abroad.”

The Presidential Global Fellowship is another scholarship for which the top tier of applicants for the Global Scholarship can be considered. The Global Fellowship is a full scholarship offered to a small number upperclassmen who can “demonstrate the highest excellence in academic achievement, leadership, and innovative global experience,” according to the program’s site.

Director of International Cooperative Education Programs Ketty Rosenfeld praised both scholarships for making the opportunity to take a co-op abroad more accessible to students. She said she sees international co-op as an opportunity for American students to be as “worldly” as students from other countries.

“American students, by nature, are not jumping into an opportunity of a lifetime,” Rosenfeld said. “They want to play it safe. That’s not how the majority of the people around the world think. If they have an opportunity to come to the US, they jump. But American students, they don’t jump.”

She acknowledged that “realistically,” most students would be likely to continue to pursue co-op positions domestically.

“It’s not easy,” she said. “But due to the funding, there are students doing it. In the past, maybe they never thought they would be able to do it.”