Boston University Student Government invited international students to voice concerns at a forum Monday evening as part of SG’s ongoing effort to improve the experiences of international students at BU, though attendance was low at the meeting.
International student and forum attendee Latifah Azlan said the forum was an ideal place to voice her concerns because she was speaking to her peers, although she was bothered that only two international students attended.
“I wish that more people would have shown up, actually,” she said. “… It gives them [international students] a place to voice out their concerns without feeling intimidated because these people are our friends. They’re our peers. They’re our age group. It really makes it easier for them to relate to you, because they have the same concerns. It’s just that we’re international, and they’re not.”
Azlan, a College of Arts and Sciences junior, came to the meeting with the primary concern of vacation housing. She said she has struggled with vacation housing since her freshman year because she has to move out of her BU residence during breaks.
“I have friends at schools in the U.S. who are also from Malaysia, and they don’t have to move out at all,” she said. “I never understood why, because I pay for the full year [of housing], but technically, I’m not getting the full year’s [access]. I understand that there are logistics involved, but at the same time, people in the apartments get to stay.”
Outreach efforts to international students, such as SG’s forum, help international students to feel more at home, Azlan said.
“It’s really easy to get lost in the sea of people that come here, so it’s great that we’re taking time to understand people from different communities and different backgrounds [and] trying to make them feel more comfortable so that they can have the best experience at BU,” she said.
Topics discussed at the forum included academic resources, mental health, vacation housing, career development and immersion into American culture. The two international attendees, along with representatives from SG Social Affairs, worked collaboratively to identify appropriate solutions to issues.
Although SG Social Affairs held a preliminary outreach to evaluate the primary issues of the international community, officials found that not every international student held the same concerns, said SG Director of Social Affairs Rebekah Leopold.
“We learned that not all international students are the same, obviously, and that some of the issues we had found in our preliminary outreach weren’t necessarily issues which we talked about in our meeting today,” Leopold, a CAS sophomore, said.
SG Associate Director of Social Affairs Noor Taraif said the forum was intended to prevent concerns of the international community from being pushed aside and neglected.
“We decided because they [international students] are such an important part of our campus, it’s really important to address these issues and to have a conversation about them,” Taraif, a CAS sophomore, said.
As an international student, Taraif actively contributed to the discussion. She said she was surprised to learn the experiences of the attendees with certain issues differed greatly from her own, particularly with the BU International Students and Scholars Outreach services, which she found unfavorable.
“My experiences have not been very good with ISSO,” she said. “It’s good to hear that one bad experience doesn’t mean that nothing else is going right.”
Monica Brova, a CAS freshman, said she found comfort in the fact that others voiced concerns similar to her own.
“It was really great that they [SG] are reaching out to international students, and that they want to hear what our concerns are,” she said.
American and international students can seek common ground on issues that many students deal with when living away from home, Brova said.
“I have a lot of American friends who are having trouble adjusting to Boston from wherever they came [from],” she said. “So am I. So it’s something that we can bond over, in some ways. Even though there might be a language barrier, we’re more similar than we might think.”
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