The organization is trying to build a similar cross-cultural environment with FIP.
“We try to reach out to Americans as FIPpers, and we always have group leaders who are Americans,” he says.
Kogl says he skipped FIP because he wanted to reach out to Americans as he acclimated to the new culture.
“I had no support structure, so I didn’t want to lean so much on internationals,” he says. “So I needed to get associated with Americans.”
But at Woodbridge, to which he was introduced by friends, he too has gravitated to the international community on campus.
He says those students “provide international perspective that bursts the Harvard bubble at times.”
In the upcoming break, Woodbridge hopes that a virtual community for the international students abroad can serve the larger student body.
This January, says Nieszporowski, Woodbridge will provide an online map indicating where in the world its members will be residing. The tool, traditionally updated only during the summer, will offer traveling members and Americans alike an opportunity to meet up and find housing with Woodbridge members around the world.
“We have friends all over the world,” says Tsering L. Sherpa ’11 from Nepal. “We get free housing to go to those countries.”
POST COLLEGE CONNECTIONS
While international students like Kogl often arrive on campus with few student connections, they leave with a guaranteed support network.
Nieszporowski says that the criterion for membership in Woodbridge’s alumni network is registering for the e-mail listserv.
The organization draws members back to campus to lead information sessions, and has created its own medical school application guide. For students like Kogl, the Woodbridge support is an improvement from the days when he was applying to Harvard with the Common Application.
“I didn’t know what a GPA was,” he says. “I just circled it.”
For many of the Woodbridge students, the connections formed in college outlast graduation because they end up working in a common location, here in the States.
Woodbridge provides workshops for these students, informing them of Optional Practical Training in which students can stay in the U.S. for 12 months working in a field directly related to the students’ area of study.
“It’s hard to tell my mom and best friend that I might end up working here,” says Buchmann.
—Staff writer Nathalie R. Miraval can be reached at nmiraval@college.harvard.edu.