With a new semester underway, Averett welcomes a new group of excited and ambitious international students from all around the world.

Daniel Lilley, a sports management major from Chorley, England, is one of the newly registered international freshmen, “I chose to come to Averett to play soccer as well as getting a degree at the same time, but I choose Averett more specifically because of the family atmosphere around campus and that everyone seems close and connected.”

Another new freshman, Mario Gutierrez, majoring in computer science and from Madrid, Spain, highlighted the athletic department as the main reason he chose Averett.

“I liked Averett because I was amazed by the whole institution and its facilities, especially North campus and the professional atmosphere around it.”

The decision of moving abroad to study in a different country comes with a lot of change, especially culturally.

“The biggest cultural change for me is the huge number of trucks on the roads, which is not a thing you usually see back home in England,”Lilley said.

In his first impression of the United States, Gutierrez said “The main thing that I noticed straight away was that the size of everything is huge. The food, the cars, the buildings etc. are so big in comparison to what it is back home in Spain”

Currently, a total of 84 international students from 25 different countries and the US Virgin Islands are enrolled at Averett with many more to come in the future.