Abstract
Academic exchanges have become a main policy for the internationalization of higher education in Brazil and worldwide. Besides allowing students the experience of living in another country, learning a new language and acquiring new skills, they are associated with hopes of renewing, updating and modernizing Brazilian universities. This article seeks to understand the dynamics of this process, articulating it with the debate on cosmopolitanism, which upholds part of the scientific discourse as a universal project. Finally, it analyzes the experience of Brazilian students who, financed by their own university, were able to attend part of their undergraduate studies in a foreign institution. According to these students, studying abroad contributed to both their life trajectories and to broaden their understanding of university and academic life.
Keywords:
Cosmopolitanism; Academic exchange; Internationalization of Higher Education; Youth; Academic mobility