{"id":213549,"date":"2026-05-21T15:24:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/?p=213549"},"modified":"2026-05-21T15:24:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T19:24:21","slug":"quality-of-life-security-and-access-to-higher-education-city-of-graz-interviews-montclair-exchange-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/2026\/05\/21\/quality-of-life-security-and-access-to-higher-education-city-of-graz-interviews-montclair-exchange-students\/","title":{"rendered":"Quality of Life, Security, and Access to Higher Education: City of Graz Interviews Montclair Exchange Students"},"content":{"rendered":"

For 76 years<\/a>, Montclair and the city of Graz, Austria have been sister cities, sharing this diplomatic, academic, and cultural partnership that aims to build bridges and prevent the destructive divisions that plagued many international relationships during World War II. In 2025, the partnership celebrated 75 years with a visit from the Graz delegation to Montclair<\/a>, and all aspects of the partnership continue to thrive, including scholarly exchanges in fields from music and theater to math and science.<\/p>\n

As part of this partnership, each year two Montclair State University student receive full-year full-ride scholarships including a living stipend to study at the Karl Franzens University<\/a> and live in Graz.<\/p>\n

This year, Jose Padilla and Atticus Heuges have not only explored academics and new social connections in German – they were even featured in a local Graz newspaper. In their German interview with a reporter, published in BIG<\/a> (B\u00fcrger:inneninformation der Stadt Graz), a large public monthly news outlet for the city of Graz, the students discussed their admiration for the Austrian quality of life, their sense of security living in a country without weapons, and their appreciation for low tuition costs at Austrian universities (non-European Union citizens pay 750 Euros, or about 900 dollars, per semester).<\/p>\n

Ranging from the challenge of being in lectures where they only understand about 80 percent of the professor\u2019s presentation because of the language barrier to praise for Austrian investment in fundamentals such as public health care and public transportation, the interview demonstrates how these students are indeed living up to the Sister-City Scholarship<\/a>\u2019s purpose of boosting intercultural communication between the United States and Austria.<\/p>\n

Jose Padilla plans to return in the fall to continue his degree in Political Science, while Atticus Heuges plans to pursue a career teaching in Europe after graduation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For 76 years, Montclair and the city of Graz, Austria have been sister cities, sharing this diplomatic, academic, and cultural partnership that aims to build bridges and prevent the destructive divisions that plagued many international relationships during World War II. In 2025, the partnership celebrated 75 years with a visit from the Graz delegation to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":213551,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-20_chss-news","category-7_homepage-news-and-events","category-197_world_languages_and_cultures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213550,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213549\/revisions\/213550"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/chss\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}