Juno Huang said she unsuccessfully approached several organizations in an attempt to improve the campus culture surrounding international students.
“I feel helpless and hopeless,” the sophomore said. “IU is missing the point with its diversity efforts. They can talk about their diverse numbers, but that doesn’t mean the campus is doing enough to be inclusive.”
Despite recent University efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, Huang and other international students said they feel IU is doing far from enough.
As an international student from Taiwan, Huang said the gap between international and domestic students is widening. She has gone to Residential Programs and Services, the IU Student Association and the Office of International Services to discuss her plans and concerns.
“I went to them with a list of suggestions,” Huang said. “They’ll tell me they support me, but not to quote them on it. Also, many groups, like IUSA, haven’t given me responses at all.”
Huang’s suggestions included making a more useful new student orientation for international students, implementing a training program for staff members and promoting intercultural events on a larger scale.
International students don’t feel comfortable in class or on campus, Huang said. She said the new environment can be overwhelming and domestic students fail to reach out and act welcoming.
“We see students dividing in two groups automatically, and this is a problem for everyone,” Huang said. “It’s an issue that has to be fixed by everyone working together and getting domestic students to just care.”
Huang said IU is supportive in the beginning while recruiting new students. However, international students are left to fend for themselves after the school year starts.
“There are so many services to make IU look good for the people who are coming in,” Huang said. “After we step on campus, that’s when the drama and isolation begins.”
After spending a year as an IUSA congressional representative, junior Ardin Yeo said he was frustrated with the student government’s culture of inaction. Yeo wrote a letter expressing his concerns about the lack of resolutions passed to help international students to IUSA at the end of his term.
“IUSA has the power and resources to enforce great resolutions that make a difference on campus,” Yeo said. “The problem is, IUSA is good at talking, but not taking any action.”
Yeo said IU is not making effective use of its potential to help international students.
Since he arrived from Singapore, he said students, faculty and staff have been unwilling to help others and the sparse programming they implement is almost never productive.
“The administration is good at organizing task forces, town hall meetings and campaigns,” Yeo said. “But after these events are over, what happens? Nothing.”
The biggest problem between groups is a lack of understanding and communication, Yeo said. He said the IU experience is large-scale and impersonal, which puts a divide between international and domestic students.
“We can’t point fingers,” Yeo said. “The problem is the culture of individualistic values and the lack of exposure to different cultures for people who are from here. We can change that if the powerful groups on campus actually get out of their gridlock.”
Graduate student Yvonne Zhao said she felt tensions between international and domestic students after she came to IU from Beijing. She said she wanted to start a dialogue to improve these relationships.
The Society for Inter-Cultural Understanding began earlier this semester to fill the communication gap between these two groups, Zhao said.
“There are few efforts on campus by students,” Zhao said. “We want to show these underrepresented groups actually exist.”
Zhao was recently elected as the international student representative for the School of Public and Environmental Affairs Graduate Student Association. She said her organization aims to showcase different cultures and experiences in a hope to educate people on campus.
The Society for Inter-Cultural Understanding will have round table discussions where international voices can speak about international issues.
In addition, their campaign, “Who’s Who at SICU,” will feature students from different groups and countries, and will tell the detailed histories of students from before they arrived on campus and how they have adapted to their new environment.
“International students are more than just people who are bad at speaking English,” Zhao said. “We’re real people with different cultures and backgrounds, and we are here for a reason.”
Angela Gast, director of international student engagement, has had her position since the beginning of this year.
“This is a new role within the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education,” Gast said. “I look at the challenges international students face every day in hopes to come up with new programming.”
Gast oversees the IU2U program, a group that meets with incoming freshman international students to help ease their transition period at a university far away from home.
“IU2U is growing,” Gast said. “Our goal is to meet with at least half of the international freshman class and reach out to more current students to make sure they have what they need in the long term.”
Students are right to have their concerns, and they should never hesitate to approach her or the Office of International Services if they need academic or social support, Gast said.
“We need feedback from students,” Gast said. “We have a lot of new programming coming in for the future, especially for ongoing support, because that’s where students have the most concerns. The more input there is, the better.”
