The Global Initiatives Master Class Series is a workshop series offered by the Global Education Office for deans, associate deans, faculty, and staff. These workshops are designed to provide support, recommendations, and guidance on engaging international and domestic students in global engagement activities.

Institutional Preparedness: 
Focusing on What Matters:
A Systems Approach to International Student Services

Facilitated by:
David L. Di Maria, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for Global Engagement
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

About the workshop:
What can international educators learn from the manufacturing floor or the emergency room? Surprisingly, a lot.

While the manufacturing and healthcare industries have long relied on Lean Process Improvement (LPI) to ensure quality and safety under pressure, higher education has been much slower, perhaps even reluctant, to embrace this approach. This interactive masterclass demonstrates how principles of LPI—derived from Japanese and U.S. organizational management philosophies—can be applied to optimize international student services, from processing applications to planning community events. We will strip away the jargon, break down the frameworks and explore real-life case studies of ways LPI enhances the student experience. Participants will leave the masterclass with a collection of tools they can immediately apply within their own work environment.

About the facilitator:
David L. Di Maria currently serves as the inaugural Vice Provost for Global Engagement at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is also the author or editor of more than 50 publications, including Achieving More with Less: Lean Management in the International Student Office and four other books. Di Maria previously served as president of AIRC: The Association of International Enrollment Management, chair of NAFSA's International Education Leadership Knowledge Community and faculty for AIEA’s Leadership Academy for New Senior International Officers. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, where he studied international education from a P-16 perspective and focused his research on international student services.