The University of Notre Dame ranks ninth in percentage of students participating in study abroad programs among American doctoral/research institutions, according to a report released by the Institute for International Education (IIE).

During fall 2010, spring 2011 and summer 2011, the focus of this year’s study, 59.7 percent of Notre Dame students had participated in study programs in other countries, a 2.8 percent increase over the previous year. The University of San Diego ranked first in the IIE report with an 86.8 percent participation rate, followed by Pepperdine University at 75.9 percent. Notre Dame ranked ninth last year as well.

Notre Dame also ranks 13th among research institutions for number of students participating in long-term study abroad experiences, 17th among research institutions for number of students participating in mid-length study abroad experiences, and 36th amongst research institutions for total number of students participating in study abroad experiences.

offers international study programs in 19 nations: Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, England, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Russia, Spain, Senegal and Uganda, as well as a program in Washington, D.C. The IIE’s report, titled “Open Doors 2012,” showed an overall 5.7 percent increase from the previous year in the number of U.S. students participating in international study programs.

The 12th annual Blue Mass for police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and their families will be celebrated at 5:15 p.m. Nov. 15 (Thursday) in the University of Notre Dame’s .

, Notre Dame’s president, will preside, and Rev. Brad Metz, C.S.C., associate director for campus vocations, will serve as the homilist. All of the area police and fire departments are invited.

The Blue Mass is named for the predominant color of uniforms worn by police officers and firefighters nationwide. It was first celebrated at Notre Dame for the victims of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and is continued to honor them and the police officers, firefighters and rescue workers who have died while serving and protecting others. The Blue Mass is open to the public.

The triennial Alumni Reunion took place Oct. 19-21 as part of the Notre Dame vs. BYU football game day activities. More than 250 Glee Club alumni came to campus to celebrate the 97th anniversary of the club. The reunion included a concert in which the current Glee Club sang a combined performance with alumni members. ()

“The Glee Club Reunion weekends are always a great way for me to reconnect with friends,” said Art Panfile, a 1975 graduate. “In addition to connecting with friends who were in the Glee Club at the same time I was, by attending reunions every three years, I’ve made friends with members from the classes since I graduated.”

Established in 1915, the Glee Club has more than 1,200 alumni who share in the tradition, music and fraternity of Notre Dame’s oldest and best known choir. The Glee Club performs a wide repertoire of music ranging from football fight songs and African-American spirituals to Renaissance motets and Indian ragas. They perform six regular concerts a year at Notre Dame to sold-out audiences and tour twice a year to locations around the United States, and occasionally around the world. Members also participate in service initiatives on campus and around South Bend.

University of Notre Dame graduates Grace Johnson and Kelsie Kiley’s documentary, “,” completed for Documentary Video Production in the (FTT), is about a new kind of modern family: one where an Illinois couple with seven biological children doubles the size of its family by adopting orphans with HIV/AIDS and special needs.

Johnson and Kiley’s film follows Carolyn and Kiel Twietmeyer, the couple who started the nonprofit organization , and other families who have adopted children through the organization.

Johnson and Kiley decided to tell the story of the Twietmeyers and their organization after reading an article about them on GoodNewsGazette.net, a site that publishes only positive stories. Though the two had never worked together before, they agreed they wanted their film to spread the family’s message and not feel forced.

“We did more research about this amazing family and realized how inspiring their story was,” Johnson says. “They were very busy promoting Project Hopeful in Australia, so we thought we wouldn’t have enough time to shoot the proper amount of footage. That was when we decided to not only focus on their family but do a piece on two other Project Hopeful families, the Heims and the Allens.”

After deciding the topic of the documentary, Johnson and Kiley began filming extensive amounts of footage and immersing themselves in the families’ lives, everything from cooking, eating, playing, going to bed and taking their medication.

“I was expecting the families to be really serious about everything, but they were more serious about showing how easy it is to deal with HIV/AIDS,” says Kiley. “It was so interesting seeing how manageable the disease is and learning how these young children deal with this unfortunate stigma attached to the disease. These families are so inspiring and they deserve to be treated as such.”

The “Project Hopeful” documentary has been chosen as an official selection for 14 film festivals, including the ; was selected as a New Hope Award Nominee in the New Hope Film Festival; was awarded second place in the Los Angeles New Wave International Film Festival; and won best picture in the RE:IMAGE Film Festival.

“It is such a rewarding feeling being selected for film festivals,” Johnson says. “Not only is it nice to know that people want to showcase something that you put so much work into, but it was doubly gratifying for us in that the Project Hopeful message will be seen and heard by many more people. These families deserve that recognition so much, and we are so happy to be able to contribute to that in some way.”

The project was supervised by FTT Associate Professional Specialist .

“Kelsie and Grace were a pleasure to have as students,” Mandell says. “They found an extraordinary subject and did a great job capturing the emotion involved in their story. The challenge in filming a documentary is to find an engaging subject and to allow the subject to tell the story instead of the filmmaker imposing their narrative on the subject. I think Kelsie and Grace achieved that and produced a wonderful document of the work that the Twietmeyers are doing.”

Johnson, who graduated as an FTT major and peace studies minor, is now a production and development coordinator for Bravo in New York City. Kiley is also living in New York and working as an assistant to producers at Lionsgate Films and Jax Media, LLC. They are still planning to do more work for Project Hopeful.

The and of the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College are sponsoring the annual “Turning Over A New Leaf” event Oct. 27 (Saturday), encouraging college student volunteers to rake the lawns of houses in the Northeast Neighborhood of South Bend.

Houses eligible for raking are between Hill Street, Angela Boulevard, Colfax Avenue and Twyckenham Drive. Last year more than a hundred college student volunteers raked the lawns of 48 houses in the Northeast Neighborhood.

All are welcome to volunteer Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.; rakes and breakfast will be provided. For more information or to sign up, please call Marguerite Taylor at 574-631-9425.

The RCLC encourages community between Notre Dame partners and the Northeast Neighborhood of South Bend through relationship-building and educational opportunities. The RCLC offers programs and activities sponsored by local agencies and organizations, including after-school tutoring, a youth Shakespeare company, the Take Ten violence prevention program, computer instruction, a youth entrepreneurship program and English-as-a-new-language classes. More than 500 residents and volunteers participate each week in on-site RCLC programming, and as many as 300 Notre Dame students, faculty and staff volunteer with center programs.

Other events the RCLC has hosted this fall have included bike rides for kids, a back-to-school picnic, neighborhood meetings and free classes for parents and caregivers of young children.

Lindsay Brown, a University of Notre Dame senior majoring in political science, has won Seventeen Magazine’s “” contest, which celebrates young women who have done something exceptional.

Brown was recognized for her service work with girls in Nepal and other countries, her involvement in the nonprofit organization “She’s the First,” and the creation of her own nonprofit project. As the contest winner, Brown received a $20,000 scholarship and will be featured on the cover of the October issue of Seventeen.

A former Notre Dame soccer player, Brown was selected from among 35,000 nominees ages 15-22 by a combination of readers’ votes and a panel of judges, including Seventeen Editor-in-Chief Ann Shoket, actress Emma Roberts and celebrity blogger Jared Eng. (Watch a of Brown finding out from her Notre Dame team that she had won.)

“I was just in shock at first," Brown told the Orange County Register about learning she had won. "When I thought about my girls in Nepal, Cambodia and Kenya, the shock turned into exhilaration. Thirteen million girls are going to see this magazine.”

With the full support of Coach Randy Waldrum and her teammates, Brown voluntarily left the soccer team last year so she could focus her extracurricular attention entirely on helping those less fortunate after returning from an internship in Nepal, where she taught at Kopila Valley Primary 91��Ƶ and formed the school’s first girls’ soccer team.

Brown has also worked the past three years with She’s the First, which supports the tuition and education of girls in the developing world. In fall 2010, Brown and her teammates, who went on to win the NCAA national championship that year, sold tie-dye cupcakes at a campus bake sale and raised enough money to sponsor three girls at Kopila Valley.

The next fall Brown shared her cupcake recipe with high schools and colleges around the country through the She’s the First website, starting a movement of more than 100 schools in 35 states for a national tie-dye cupcake sale that November. Brown and She’s the First raised more than $22,000, enough to sponsor the education of 48 girls at Kopila Valley.

After leaving the soccer team, Brown co-founded , which stands for Soccer Empowering Girls Worldwide and You. The project aims to connect female soccer athletes in the U.S. with girls in third world countries to empower them through soccer, and also sponsors soccer programs in Nepal and Cambodia.

Brown said she entered the contest to put girls in Nepal and other countries on the radar for American girls and is excited that her achievements will reflect the education she has received at Notre Dame.

“I really don’t think this cupcake sale and campaign would have been as successful at another university, because the Notre Dame community understands the value of helping others,” Brown told the Observer. “When I saw the reality that girls still don’t go to school and it’s taboo for them to play soccer, I wasn’t OK with that. Notre Dame gave me the tools to change it.”

Nine Irish charities have each received a portion of the proceeds from “Notre Dame: A Welcome Home,” the pep rally held Aug. 31 in Dublin, Ireland, in association with the Emerald Isle Classic football game between Notre Dame and Navy, which was played Sept. 1 in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium.

A total of $154,000 was donated directly to the charities at an event held yesterday at , the home of the Keough-Naughton Notre Dame Centre in Dublin. The event was hosted by Irish television personality Miriam O’Callaghan, who also served as host of the pep rally, which treated the audience of 10,000 to a showcase of Irish and American traditions and musical performances in Dublin’s sold-out O2 Arena. (.)

The charitable organizations, each of which received $17,000, are the Aisling Project, the CSC Centre, Forbairt Naionrai Teoranta, the Foundation Project, Friends of the Elderly, the Life Centre, the Other Voice Project, Separated Children and Youth Horizons.

“The importance of the Irish diaspora really manifested itself so obviously over the weekend,” O’Callaghan told the Irish Times. “You hear about it, but then you see thousands of Americans visiting Ireland. They love us, they spend money and they’re a friend to us at a time when Ireland desperately needs friends.”

Tickets for the pep rally sold for $20 with the total cost of the event underwritten by the Glen Dimplex Group. One hundred percent of the event’s proceeds were donated to the charities, which were chosen to reflect Notre Dame’s community-based learning programs in Ireland.