Group (SY)MPATHY Social Integration Project for International Students at KU
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.
We can integrate our experiences in Socratic dialogues and new learnings from project process. We have realized that we always listen people with our filters instead of understanding exactly what they try to tell. In a face to face dialogue, we cannot understand the other side if we don’t listen without filters in our mind. Trying to understand the other side without listening to them is wishful thinking. Consequently, our first step was understanding subject of the project (understanding refugees)and we took different lessons in this process and it was an efficient step for the project at the end.
We needed to listen more what our persona needs exactly before we start. After the lesson we took from our first experiences and classes, we talked with many international students, office of international programs and members of international students’ club. In addition to these conversations, we prepared a survey and collected data in respect to the students’ need. In the light of these data, we decided to organize The Iftar event.
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.
After the first step, we decided not to determine the international students’ problems by ourselves but to produce value propositions by talking with them in this process. We determined our first persona as close as possible for example a Syrian student from our school, a 21-year-old boy. Their sufferings should be determined at the beginning. Then we need to consider what are other projects going on regarding the international students’ problems.
Our first objective as we mentioned above is to determine the problem & opportunity. We mentioned our value proposition again and rethink our specific target segment, funders and regulators and then we created channels to reach our target people. Also, key metrics was an important issue for us to determine how can we know we’re being successful at 2021. At the consciousness side, one of the key parts was social impact, we designed our social impact is healthier integration. We also discussed which UN Development Goals we are contributing to achieve. Our main goal was Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries. We also choose our partners in accordance with our goals and key metrics. At that activity, we understood the importance of consciousness when we’re launching a new business and thinking every aspect in the right way.
Finally, we have planned to organise The Iftar event in May 15 at the balcony in front of the Ku Radio. We think that this event will be our first step and any student will have the chance to know iftar culture which is important for Turkish culture. In addition to that, students will bring some local foods from their countries and we will be introducing many cultures in this event. Native students will have the chance to learn different cultures. In the contrary to most of the KU events, The Iftar will be held in English and international students will have chance to make new friends.
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.
By using conscious lenses, we started criticizing our general works in terms of inclusiveness because our projects consist of people from various cultures. Therefore, we chose our logo which shows our inclusive environment. Even, we deliberated about our motto, ‘Send your vibes of sympathy!’ in order to show our kind of hype vibes. This continued on our viral video part and we try to reflect our community spirit and our logo in that logo. At the end, we were satisfied with the video of us due to its energetic and inclusive taste.
At this level of our project, we added some foreign people in our organization community. This flourish made us more inclusive in all processes. We have a whatsapp group now with all English chats. Through this experience, we started truly understand that we have to talk in English during the event. Even though that was very obvious through all process, facing with this situation was still challenging for us.
Team Members and Credit: Ali Barbaros Küçüknane, Burak Yorulmaz, Elif Sena Tekin, Serra Çetin, Tutku Kılıçarslan, Yasemin Berkkan.
