Diploma in English

Selective and Successful

The Diploma in English for Graduate and Professional Studies (DGP) is designed for students with advanced proficiency in English who spend a year perfecting their language skills in Institute for English Language Programs (IEL) courses and testing the waters of American higher education as a prelude to entering graduate and professional programs at American universities. To complete the DGP, students take two IEL courses and two graduate-level courses each semester at the Harvard Extension School.

The diploma program attracts many applicants, but its stringent requirements--a TOEFL score of 600 and a TWE score of 5, plus successful participation in Harvard University's Summer School Intensive Integrated Skills Program run by the Institute for English Language Programs--have tended to ensure that only a small number of applicants are granted admission. In fall 1995 Maxim Donde was accepted as the program's charter student, and in 1996 two students, Seungjoon Lee and Nancy Sato Misawa, were granted admission. They each completed their diploma courses in the ensuing year, and IEL is happy to report that this semester all three graduates began graduate courses of study at prestigious American universities.

Donde emigrated to the US in 1994 from the Soviet Union, after attending the Ekaterinburg Advanced Artillery Command Academy of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star. He was awarded a Gold Medal at the academy for his work towards a degree in sociology with distinction that qualified him as an officer with advanced political and military education. During his studies for the diploma, Donde took IEL's high advanced level courses and a variety of economics and business courses at the Extension School. After receiving his DGP, he returned to Moscow and worked for a year as a research analyst for Pioneer, an American investment company, while he completed applications to business schools in the US. Donde is now a student in the MBA program at the University of Chicago.

A native of Seoul, South Korea, Seungjoon Lee completed a degree in economics at Yonsei University before entering the Korean Army, where he served as a platoon leader. On being accepted to the DGP program, Lee came to the US to attend the 1996 Summer School, and while taking IEL and Extension English and economics courses the following year, lived with an American "granny" who helped him cross many cultural bridges. Immediately after receiving his DGP, Lee was accepted into the PhD program in economics at Boston University.

Nancy Sato Misawa brought both Peruvian and Japanese backgrounds to her DGP studies in IEL, having completed a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru and a Master's in Commerce at Waseda University in Tokyo. When she applied to the DGP program, she was working as a securities analyst and marketing director in Peru. During her DGP year, Sato took IEL courses at the high advanced level and Extension School courses in statistics and financial accounting. Upon completion of the diploma program, she entered the graduate program in industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.

With its three graduates coming to the DGP Program from three different continents, IEL hopes to maintain its growing reputation among international students who are interested in advanced professional and graduate studies in the US as the place for a successful transition to study at leading universities.