Video helps volunteers help international students

BY CASEY MICHEL
Special to the Rice News

As head of the Office of International Students and Scholars, Adria Baker helps create cross-cultural connections between foreign students and their volunteer hosts from the community. For the past 14 years, Baker has utilized a video, produced in the early 1980s, to help her hosts welcome the new students.

But while the video was largely successful, Baker noticed that each year saw diminishing returns and increased confusion. It wasn’t that the focus on creating a welcoming atmosphere had changed; rather, the viewers were becoming increasingly distracted by the now-obsolete 1980s technology featured in the video.

”The orientation video was from almost 30 years ago, and while it had good content, the message was getting lost,” Baker said. ”They had one of those long phone cords to walk across the kitchen with, among other things the students are too young to remember, and the people watching would just get distracted and find it funny.”

As such, Baker and her staff, in partnership with the Institute of International Education’s Southern Regional Center, took it upon themselves to update the video. Beginning in September 2009, the OISS began scripting the 27-minute video, called ”International Friendship Program.” They hired an outside firm to film multiple members of the staff, foreign students and community volunteers discussing different and successful methods for welcoming foreign students into the university’s fold.

The video was unveiled at the department’s annual training conference last April, and it wasn’t long before both the viewers and accolades began to roll in.

”People are watching the video all across the world,” Baker said. ”Within the first month of posting it online almost 3,000 people had viewed it, from 29 different countries. Many of the people watching it are from other universities, and they’re grateful.”

The main purpose of the video, set on Rice’s campus, is to help out those volunteering to host Rice’s growing foreign student population. The video, which can be viewed at http://oiss.rice.edu/content.aspx?id=1100, dispenses tips on how to allow foreign students to receive a truly American experience, as opposed to simply heading from class straight back home.

”You’ll have students go directly from lab to class to lab, and never go into an American home,” Baker said. ”This video trains the volunteers to learn what the best way is to help the students, how to interact with them.”

Rice’s foreign student population has grown considerably over the last few years, and there are now approximately 350 foreign-born undergraduates and nearly 800 foreign-born graduate students. Baker said this video will play a crucial role in acclimating an increasingly important population on Rice’s campus.

”When you’re living in a new country the main thing you want is a friend,” Baker said. ”Watching how the volunteers help their new international friends and how they connect with the new students is amazing.”