2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

International exchanges are exciting opportunities for students and faculty, while risk management and risk mitigation are critical to ensure that such exchanges are safe so that the group will enjoy the exchanges. However, students and faculty might not realize how important it is to manage and mitigate risks and what their roles are in such efforts. Especially, new trip leaders might find it overwhelming to even consider which factors should be considered. Furthermore, trip leaders may be occupied with connecting with the hosts, developing class activities, attending to logistical details, etc. to overlook risk management. As a result, the group may respond to risks reactively but not proactively, making the risky situations more stressful or more costly unnecessarily than what needs to be. This paper focuses on faculty-led trips, because there are many variations in faculty-led trips in terms of course structures, destinations, activities, trip lengths, and group sizes, which complicate the risk management and risk mitigation procedures. This paper provides a thorough discussion on the framework of strategies in risk management and risk mitigation based on literature and campus policies, and then presents practical tips and seven case studies from the authors’ personal experiences. These case studies demonstrated how the strategies were integrated and applied, which led to best solutions.