Welcome to the Office of International Students & Scholars
The Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS) at the University of California,
Santa Barbara (UCSB) serves the needs of international students and scholars as
well as the UCSB community who work with this international population. OISS provides
administrative assistance, counseling, advising, and programming to the campus community.
The staff meet with students and scholars about immigration, employment, housing,
health care, financial concerns, academic problems, travel, and personal issues.
Archana Gopal, Graduate Student
Archana Gopalan is truly a global citizen. She was born in the city of Chennai, in Tamil Nadu Province in India but spent her high school years in Bahrain. She returned to her home town of Chennai for her undergraduate training and now she is just finishing her graduate degree at UCSB in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Archana has always been at the top of her class. She was when she was doing her undergraduate work in Electrical Engineering in Chennai and she is here at UCSB. But what about being a woman in a profession dominated by men? Archana is forthright, “It is not intimidating at all by being a minority among men. Rather, it’s a very challenging environment. Fierce competition among peers is in fact very healthy and gets you working even harder towards achieving your goals. You have to make the best choice at the right time.” And she has certainly moved at the right time here. She did a research internship at Apple in the summer of 2008 in a group that worked on compression standards for video processing. She now has number of job offers for her post-completion practical training and has the enviable dilemma of having to decide between offers from two of the most prestigious computer technology companies in the US.
What was it like being a graduate student at UCSB? Archana says that she always feels very comfortable in the UCSB environment with the ocean right next to campus, great weather, and a large international graduate student population. But she came here because of UCSB’s reputation in Engineering. The professors are helpful and accessible. Engineering pedagogy at UCSB emphasizes practical training and the promotion of critical thinking. And now it’s time to apply what she has learned to a promising career!