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To Thad Teo, friend and fellow collaborator in international student programming at the

University of Washington,
This letter serves as acknowledgement of the excellent work you accomplished as an intern, with
90 hours of committed collaboration, in Academic Support Programs (ASP) at the University of
Washington. I am thankful for the opportunity to work with you and have appreciated our work
developing courses and programming to support our international student population at the
University of Washington.
As we have discussed our work together began at an opportune time. The UW has, since 2008,
dramatically increased the numbers of international students enrolled. Recent hiring (including
my own) has provided an occasion for us to think creatively about the complex networks of
support that exist, or should exist, to help this student population thrive at an R1 university.
One aspect of our collaboration that I think is emblematic of our work in trying to address these
issues is the course we developed and taught together, Understanding American Higher
Education. Your contributions truly helped us build a curriculum that helped international students
better understand the goals of a liberal arts education, the importance of a holistic college experience,
and the relationship between higher-education and work life beyond it. In addition to building
curriculum I was happy to see you get the experience teaching and working with students in the
classroom. As we discussed during the site visit, our teaching team, which also included an
undergraduate international student, perhaps represented a very interesting model combining
faculty, student affairs and students all in team-teaching practice. The assessment you developed
for this course will help me correct, refine and refocus this class in the future. In my estimation this
work in and of itself clearly addressed nearly all of your SDA learning outcomes, with a particular
emphasis on SDA outcomes 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 10.
I think you have further developed a truly complex understanding of the international student
experience working as a co-teacher and as a tutor-mentor to one of our students in ASP. You have a
360 degree view of the way our program supports students who are struggling academically at the
university. As a co-teacher in General Studies 101, an observer in Education 401 (the class for our
tutor-mentors), and as a participant in our ASP meetings where we discuss support strategies for
students, you have observed and participated in a program that uses an interventionist model of
support. Your feedback and suggestions have already helped improve this course. I look forward to
having some final conversations about your experiences as a tutor-mentor and how ASP may want to
build out additional support. Your final research project is also a welcome contribution to help me
learn more about structures of support for international students at peer-institutions.
As I noted in the site visit I appreciate your flexibility in our collaboration as I myself was (and am!)
learning my job. In part I think this created an opportunity to see real time how programming
works and how campus collaboration can get done.
I have come to believe that good programming gets done at a large institution, not necessarily
through mandates from on high, but from the good will and commitments of people assessing
challenges in their programs and building support accordingly.
One great aspect of your professional identity that will serve you well in this regard is that you are
committed to meeting and getting to know campus partners, learning about their work, and growing a

more nuanced understanding of a variety of units on campus. This is an excellent personality trait
that can help break through any potential silo effect that can happen at a university! This also
resonates with SDA outcomes 3, 8 and 10.
Your professional promise is excellent. Of course, you already are a professional so I was not
surprised at your wonderful commitment to our program. As we discussed at the site visit I think you
can really take your gifts into a variety of programs and I can imagine you making strong
contributions in and beyond student affairs. As you continue to think about graduate school you may
want to think about how a Ph.D program, as an example, may position you career wise. Are you
interested in a faculty position, teaching and doing research, or are you interested in using a Ph.D to
inform your practice within a particular program? The decision is not necessarily either/or but it is
worth considering. As you know, there are many people in Undergraduate Academic Affairs at the
UW who could help you think through this based on their own work/graduate experiences.
Selfishly I would love to see your research develop and inform this unique historical moment we
have discussed: a time when unprecedented numbers of international students are arriving on
campuses across the U.S. What does this mean for the students futures? What diverse paths might
international students be on that we understand or dont understand? How can we support them
accordingly? This is all rich food for thought and your experiences in and beyond Academic

Support Programs have well prepared you to start digging in.


Again, I see this not as the end of our work together but as a stage in our collaboration as
colleagues.
Thank you so much for being part of the ASP team Thad.
Ryan Burt, Ph.D
Academic Support Programs
University of Washington

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