Social Integration Project for International Students at KU by Group (SY)MPATHY
Our project aims to create an opportunity for any international student (non-Turkish speaker) to integrate them in our social life and academic life in our university. We want to take a first step to our project with a global kitchen with an Iftar Event. The Iftar is going to create opportunity for the students to cook their traditional foods and then we want to organise a festival introducing their culture to native and other students coming from different cultures.
When we consider the students’ problems that they mostly encountered at our university, we observed that language barrier is one the biggest problems for them. Some classes might be held in Turkish, even if it is specified that the language of the class is English in the syllabus. Some review classes also might be held in Turkish. Moreover, almost all social activities and club activities are held in Turkish in our university. Therefore, international students may have difficulties to integrate socially and to make new friends in campus.
Today, we exactly are working on these problems as changemakers. We took certain lessons from the beginning and we know many different lessons are waiting for us at the end of the project. We hope to touch someone’s life at the end with this project. First, we changed ourselves in the process, then it is time to change something in campus, then in the city, in the country, finally as changemakers we believe that we can change everything in this world by starting ourselves.
If you wish to learn more about our project, please visit the our Medium post!