Welcome to the GSIS website. Your having come this far suggests that you share my fascination and concern with the world beyond our increasingly porous frontiers. Today the transnational careers open to educated persons continue to multiply. Whether in Government, finance, industry, international organizations or the non-profit sector, you can observe the same exponential growth of opportunities to live and/or work transnationally.

With over a quarter of our students coming from abroad and our graduates pursuing their ambitions in all sectors and in places as diverse as Washington, New York, Santiago, Tbilisi, London, Houston, and Guatemala City, not to mention Denver itself, our school exemplifies the expansion and diversification of opportunity and the global mixing of peoples. At GSIS, we take pride in preparing you to compete effectively for the best jobs available and to perform with distinction once you are in them. The school is large enough to offer professional training appropriate to a great range of transnational careers yet still small enough to provide each student with the kind of individualized attention every school claims to provide but very few do. At our school, the incentive system recognizes teaching and mentoring as well as scholarship: Faculty here are on the cutting edge of thought in a half dozen fields. I think we have struck the right balance.

The student centeredness of the school is reflected in such various ways as:

• direct participation in school governance including decisions on appointments
• an extensive entry interview with the Director of career counseling
• easy access to faculty mentors

Location has proven to be an advantage for our students and graduates and not because Colorado is a site of great beauty. They compete on a level playing field for positions in the UN or the US Government or in coastal-based multinational corporations or non-profit entities, while enjoying a privileged position in relation to the rapidly growing transnational sector in the Rocky Mountain West, particularly in Colorado, capital of the global cable industry, a major telecommunications venue, a rocketing software and internet center and home to a miscellany of global actors like the huge consulting engineering firm, CH2MHill, a world leader in water pollution control, and Ball Corporation, one of the world’s largest aluminum packaging firms. Denver itself is home to a growing number of non-profit institutions with a transnational focus like the US-Russian and the US-Mexico Chambers of Commerce and Colorado Microcredit which is developing microcredit operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua in collaboration with the International Association of Professional Women.

In addition to privileged access to regional actors with a transnational focus, our students secure internships and jobs in different parts of the United States and abroad: In the United Nations, the Washington-based International Human Rights Law Group, Amnesty’s London-based International Secretariat, the Chilean foreign Ministry, Lockheed-Martin in California, the Organization of American States operation in Guatemala and countless other places.

The short of the matter is that the communications and transportation revolutions make it possible to have a truly distinguished school of international studies in Denver where natural beauty, an open tolerant society, strongly-supported cultural institutions and a well-developed infrastructure draw people and companies, humanitarian idealists no less than aggressive entrepreneurs, from around the United States and the wider world.

So we invite you to consider joining our community of students, staff and faculty. We will work you hard all week. But on a random Friday night you can see La Traviata and on Saturday try the slopes of Vail. For anyone who is disciplined and reasonably well organized, life’s pleasures need not be put on hold while you prepare for a distinguished career. And when the preparation is complete and you go off into the wider world, you will carry with you, I believe, enduring memories of a school in the service of its students’ dreams.

Tom J. Farer,
Dean
tfarer@du.edu