After a 30-year career working in study abroad at UD that shaped best practices for the field, UD alumna Lisa Chieffo looks out over Germany's Black Forest. Since her retirement, Chieffo and husband Joachim Piprek have enjoyed more opportunities for personal travel around the world.

Making a career of study abroad

Article by Megan M.F. Everhart Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson and courtesy of Lisa Chieffo July 19, 2023

UD alumna turns her early love of travel into a professional life helping students discover the world

Study abroad programs provide students with life changing experiences, and some students turn these experiences into a lifetime of discovering the world. University of Delaware alumna Lisa Chieffo’s semester abroad launched a 30-year long career in the field; a career that ultimately shaped the way UD and institutions across the country manage study abroad programs.

Costa Rica was one stop in Lisa Chieffo’s career in helping to guide UD’s study abroad programs.

In the early 2000s, Chieffo began working in the Office of International Programs and Special Sessions, forerunner of today’s Center for Global Programs and Services (CGPS) and UD's first iteration of a centralized office for international programs, alongside former director Lesa Griffiths, currently a professor in the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Chieffo had been coordinating study abroad programs in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures for nearly a decade before taking on the new role.

During the next 10 years, Griffiths and Chieffo, together with a growing team of study abroad coordinators, put processes in place that became new standards in study abroad administration, and conducted research that investigated the benefits of short-term programs. "UD was really ahead of its time. I presented at many national education abroad conferences, and colleagues at other institutions would be so impressed about all our systems, processes and research,” Chieffo said. “Our work developed into a profession over the course of 30 years."

At the time, institutions were questioning the value of programs that lasted only a few weeks compared to more traditional semester-long opportunities. Griffiths suggested conducting research that would prove they were important.

"Having led several short-term programs, I knew they not only had an impact, but they had a place in study abroad — particularly in discipline-based programs,” Griffiths said. “Because of our short-term model at UD that included programs in many, many disciplines, we were able to describe impacts for students studying photography, engineering, agriculture, history, language, culture and many other disciplines in locations around the world, something I think was unique to UD."

The resulting research paper, published in 2004 in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, was a seminal study in the field and has been cited more than 600 times. It led to the later development of the Global Engagement Measurement Scale (GEMS), which is still used by CGPS to assess the impact of study abroad experiences.

"We established a set of best practices that created an administrative framework that allowed the faculty directors to create innovative programs specifically for their majors,” Griffiths said. “The result was a tremendous increase in student participation rate in study abroad which was consistently ranked in the top 10 nationally."

Lisa Chieffo earned a Fulbright Scholarship and spent a year in Bayreuth, Germany in the spring of 1991.

UD garnered several awards during this time from national organizations including NAFSA: Association of International Educators and the Institute for International Education.

For Chieffo, the time was a highlight in her career, one that came after her own experience exposed her to the power of travel. In 1987, as an undergraduate student pursuing a three languages degree in German, Italian and Japanese, she spent a semester in Vienna, Austria, on a program led by Mark Miller, the Emma Smith Morris Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science and International Relations.

“My family didn’t go anywhere,” Chieffo said. “I grew up in Claymont, Delaware, which was blue collar, working class. We were not exposed to high culture. Being in Vienna opened my eyes to all that a city can offer. The history course I took there allowed me to follow thousands of years of the city’s development, and I found it amazing to see remnants of that in person.”

Lisa Chieffo visited the Melk Abbey in Austria during her spring 1987 study abroad program in Vienna.

That semester was the catalyst for Chieffo’s career at UD coordinating and administering study abroad programs that gave thousands of UD students the chance to have the same life-changing experience she did. After graduation, Chieffo spent a year in Tübingen, Germany, on a Fulbright Scholarship and then continued at UD, earning a master’s degree in German and a doctorate in education.

Soon after completing her master's, Chieffo accepted a job with the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures (LLC) to coordinate the department’s newly developed short-term study abroad programs. There she began managing the first LLC-specific Winter Session programs in Caen, France; Granada, Spain; and Bayreuth, Germany, followed by winter programs in Costa Rica and Martinique. The department sponsored semester-long programs in Caen, Bayreuth, and Granada as well. In both programs, all coursework was conducted in the target language.

Lisa Chieffo (left) and Lesa Griffiths published an article in 2006 in IIE Networker on study abroad programs for first-year students.

“The concept was to offer lower-level language courses over winter session and more advanced courses on semester programs in Caen, Granada and Bayreuth, with the hope that students would be enticed to continue their language study abroad for a semester after getting a brief taste of language immersion over winter session,” Chieffo said.

The position was the first time someone other than a faculty member managed the program details and was a precursor to what eventually became a centralized study abroad office. Chieffo worked with CGPS until her retirement in 2021, ending her time at UD as CGPS interim director and having devoted her entire career to creating life-altering experiences for students like the one she had herself in 1987. She currently works part time with Global Academic Ventures, a study abroad service provider that UD has partnered with for the past two decades.

In 2015, Chieffo was approached to co-edit the NAFSA's Guide to Successful Short-Term Programs Abroad, 3rd edition, published in 2017, yet another gratifying experience of her time at UD. "I am sure it was because of UD's national reputation for managing so many short-term programs abroad for so long and so well.

"The field is populated by people whose lives were impacted in a profound way by their own study abroad experience – learning about a culture from the inside and having made another country a second home. It is a joy to enable that experience for others."