The number of students pursuing higher education outside their home countries has increased dramatically over the past two decades. One effect has been a rapid expansion of scholarly work focused on student mobility, especially in countries hosting large populations of international students. In this chapter, I draw on some of that work to frame the research behind this book, highlighting motivations, assumptions, methods, and goals. I also explicitly situate the book as an example of grounded, qualitative research that presents detailed explorations of the experiences of nine students as they made their way through college in the U.S. In the second half of the chapter, I outline three frameworks forming the intellectual core of the book—agency, identity, and motivation—and then describe my own theoretical contribution, the idea of alignment. In the final section, I preview the book’s remaining chapters.