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Literature has consistently pointed to the significant role of personality in students’ decisions to participate in study abroad programs. Studies have highlighted how such experiences are impacted by key personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and social traits such as social information processing, social skills, and social awareness. Yet there remains a notable gap in the limited examination of students’ personality attributes and their impact on study abroad outcomes. To address this gap, this study investigates the effects of students’ personality attributes and demographic attributes on their transformative learning experiences during their study abroad programs using Mezirow’s transformative learning theory. The research integrates quantitative data collected through instruments. Qualitative insights gathered from open-ended questions in the survey to comprehensively investigate important associations between student attributes and their transformative learning experiences during study abroad programs. Results showed that personality traits, particularly openness and agreeableness, and social skills (a social intelligence scale construct) had a strong correlation with different phases of the journey of transformation. Additionally, the results indicated a potential association between students’ academic majors and the likelihood of experiencing shifts in their epistemic dimension of habits of mind during their respective short-term study abroad programs. 

Changes in course delivery mechanisms necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic created an opportunity to develop a Virtual International Collaborative Experiential Program (VICEP) as an alternative to traditional, travel-based study abroad programs. This paper presents the results of an investigation of engineering students’ motivation, perceived challenges, and preferred geographic areas for the VICEP. A sample of 116 first-year engineering students at the University of Cincinnati responded to survey items regarding their perceptions of motivation to participate in the VICEP, including in terms of expectancy, value, and cost, along with open-ended questions. Both male and female students scored the highest on value and the lowest on cost but with different weights. However, gender differences in the expectancy, value, and cost were not statistically significant. Intercultural collaboration and learning opportunities were significantly more important for female students than for males, and the engaged learning environment of the program and career skills development were more important for male students than for females. Time commitment and the structure of the program as well as the stress endured during the study abroad were strongly negative factors, more so for male students. Interestingly, the virtual nature of the project and the existence (or not) of incentives were not encouraging to most students. Structuring the world into seven geographic regions, the most preferred regions for virtual collaboration have the common feature of being technologically developed, except China which was among the lowest-ranking countries/regions. Preferences for geographical regions between male and female students was significant only for some regions. The present research provides valuable information for faculty leading virtual intercultural collaborative experiences.