News & Events
Keep up on news about UNMC's community of international students and study abroad students.
Our Signature Events
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International Student Welcome Lunch & Ambassador Appreciation
This September event for international students provides a time for meeting and learning about each other and UNMC.
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Celebrate Culture!
An event called Celebrate Culture! is held in in conjunction with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May. Interactive tables, representative of these countries, featured calligraphy, ddakji (a traditional game played using folded paper tiles), lantern making, liusu (tassel) making, origami and trivia.
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Holi Festival
The International Student Association hosts the Festival of Colors, an annual spring event celebrating the Hindu Holi Festival. The event, symbolizing rejuvenation and optimism, celebrates the arrival of spring after winter, signifies the victory of good over evil, and, for many, a festive day to meet others, laugh, forgive and forget.
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International Education Week
The annual International Education Week is a campus-wide event held during the fall semester and features clothing, foods, music and traditions from a variety of cultures represented at UNMC. Walk through a global experience and discover what makes each culture unique, while also finding the connections that bring us all together. These events are organized by UNMC’s International Student Association.
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Chinese Cultural Fair
The Chinese Cultural Fair is held every year around the Chinese New Year, providing an opportunity to to celebrate Chinese culture with food, crafts, games, music and dance. UNMC’s Chinese Scholarship Council students are the main organizers of the event.
International Photo Contest
Our annual photo contest, open to all members of the UNMC community, features photos capturing the culture, spirit and landscapes of other countries, inspiring adventure, cultural awareness and diversity. The 2023 grand prize winning photo above, by Devashri Gandhi, is titled "Purity of Soul."
Office of Global Engagement Announces D.J. and Janet Thayer Family Global Engagement Award Recipient
The recipient of the 2026 D.J. and Janet Thayer Family Global Engagement Award is Dr. Steven Yeh, Stanley M. Truhlsen Jr. Chair of Ophthalmology; Professor, UNMC Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences; and Director, Retina and Uveitis Service.
Dr. Yeh's proposed project seeks to develop and strengthen a comprehensive global ophthalmic engagement program focused on training initiatives for health care providers outside the U.S. and within UNMC in global health, extending our impact from Nebraska to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Dr. Yeh’s long-term goal is to develop a hybrid curriculum that combines both virtual webinars with in-person training that would bring UNMC ophthalmology expertise to three countries where we have existing partnerships or ongoing field work – Honduras, Nepal and Sierra Leone.
Each country is unique in their level of ophthalmic infrastructure and capacity and ongoing training needs. As such, the settings provide unique training experiences for participatory learning by UNMC faculty, residents and medical students where health care providers could be actively engaged and contribute meaningfully, while also bringing UNMC expertise to resource-limited settings in low and middle-income countries.
Given the strength of partnerships in LMICs within Africa, Asia and Latin America, the development of a program “From Nebraska to the World” will provide an unmatched and unique opportunity for bidirectional knowledge exchange, raising awareness of avoidable blindness and practical tools for the reduction of the burden of vision loss and blindness. In the same way that prior learners from UNMC have traveled with their team to Sierra Leone and other low- and middle-income countries, the specific opportunities in the D.J. and Janet Thayer Family Global Engagement Award will also train future leaders including medical students, residents and faculty in global health through education, research and service, within the context of sight-saving vision health programs.
“Before the Vows,” by Ridhi Bhola, UNMC student, is the grand prize winner of the Sixth Annual International Photo Contest.
Office of Global Engagement Announces 2026 International Photo Contest Winners
The Office of Global Engagement has announced the winners of its Sixth Annual International Photo Contest.
The contest had 15 faculty/staff and 15 student/resident participants, for a total of 74 photos submitted. Thank you to all those who submitted photos for the contest.
The international photos were judged based on originality and creativity, photographic quality and communication of culture and place. The contest had three categories for submissions: Cityscapes/Architecture, Landscapes/Nature, and People/Animals with first prize winners for each division.
The winners are:
Grand prize winner:
- Ridhi Bhola,"Before the Vows"
Student/resident winners:
- Cityscapes/Architecture first place: Ridhi Bhola “Living Canvas”
- Landscapes/Nature first place: Kendra Kozisek, “Oishi Park”
- People/Animals first place: Ridhi Bhola, "Before the Vows"
- Honorable Mention: Manisha Ghising “Mani Stone Piles”
- Honorable Mention: Santosh Shrestha, “Golden Horizon”
- Honorable Mention: Santosh Shrestha, “Echoes of Tradition”
Faculty/staff winners:
- Cityscapes/Architecture first place: Annette Guy, “The Orange Tree”
- Landscapes/Nature first place: Suranji Wijekoon, “Fortress of a Forgotten Empire”
- People/Animals first place: Santiago Ortiz Barragan, “The Bloom of Oaxaca”
- Honorable Mention: Suranji Wijekoon, “Echoes of Calm: A Buddhist Sanctuary”
- Honorable Mention: Maha Farid, “Listening to the Ocean”
- Honorable Mention: Irving Zucker, “Harbor Boats, Cassis France”
- Honorable Mention: Yuka Collison, “The Torchbearer”
View all the 2026 submitted photos
Read Our Publications
Keep up with our news, important updates and events through our publications, including our annual reports, quarterly newsletters and monthly bulletins.
All linked publications are pdf files.