Thanks to an agreement signed in 2019, students from both universities will be carrying out joint research, with the aim of achieving a double degree, from Chile and Italy.

The Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO) started to collaborate with Sapienza University of Rome in 2017, through the UFRO Doctorate in Communication and the Faculty of Political Sciences, Sociology and Communication of Sapienza, which led to an exchange agreement that was signed two years later and that allows the students of both universities to carry out research under joint supervision, with the possibility to achieve a double degree.

This academic alliance is part of the internationalization process of the UFRO Doctorate in Communication. The program does already have a double degree agreement with the University of Groningen (Netherlands), which currently allows three students to work on their double degree and will allow two other students to start this process next year. In this context, the agreement with Sapienza University will be a great opportunity for even more students.

According to Dr. Carlos del Valle, the director of the doctoral program, the access to a double degree is a significant contribution to the academic training of the students and a cultural and educational enrichment as well.
“Doctoral research within an agreement for joint supervision considerably changes the training perspective. I can really see a transformation in the students, since they started to work with both universities. The level of professionalism in their research and their contributions in our biweekly meetings (which now take place online, because of the pandemic) are each time more sophisticated, because the students get to know new points of view and a different bibliography, which is a very special and useful contribution,” explained Dr. Del Valle.

One of the challenges that the students of the program have to face when they go to other universities – European universities in this case – is the fact that they will have to work in a context that is very different from ours regarding their research and academic stays. “When you work together with other universities in Latin America, the experience is more similar to ours and it is easier to adapt, but when the students go to a university in Europe, they do not only have to adapt to cultural differences in general, but also on the academic level. But, of course, that also makes the experience more exciting and it is definitely worth it,” he said.