Students participating in education abroad may be new to a country and may not know much about the campus or community around them. At Kent State University, international students have an opportunity to connect with domestic students through a program called FRIEND.
FRIEND stands for Foster Relationships, Intercultural Experiences, Navigation skills and Discovery. It is a semester-long program in which international and domestic students are paired and spend the semester getting to know each other by meeting once a week. Students can participate in activities such as going to a Flash Activities Board event, checking out what is happening downtown or visiting other cities and exploring the Cleveland Museum of Art, for example.
“We really want students to make a friend that hopefully lasts longer than just the semester they are in the program,” Ashton Leigh, assistant director of the Office of Intercultural Student Life, told Kent State Today.
At the beginning of the program, a kickoff event on Sept. 15 in the Schwebel Room in the Kent Student Center let students participating in FRIEND meet each other and begin planning what they would do together. Students also played games such as “This or That” and planned a day of activities they could do off campus with a $100 budget.
Meheraj Khatri, a junior computer science major from Nepal, partnered with Christopher Parks, a sophomore nursing major.
“I realized how big an impact having a friend to go to was to some exchange students,” Parks said. “I’m excited to learn about Meheraj’s home country of Nepal. I really am interested in his culture, how growing up was for him compared to growing up in America.”
For Khatri, the program also offered an opportunity to meet other students outside of his own cultural circle
“As an international student, I’ll say firsthand that we find someone from our culture, from our background. We tend to be in our own circle,” Khatri said. “Programs like the FRIEND program try to break that bubble and let us explore different backgrounds and different cultures.”
