In fall of 2019, I participated in the Mavbuddies program.  I was partnered with three international students who were a part of the Intensive English Language program here on campus.  One was from Japan, another from India, and the third was from Saudi Arabia.  We met once a week throughout the semester.  We would do various activities during our sessions.  We’ve played games, visited Sibley Park, and had discussions on various topics.  Some topics we talked about included our hometowns, culture, and new experiences on campus.  For our final project, we volunteered at a local animal shelter called BENCHS.  We helped with chores that needed to be done in order to close the shelter for the night.  We then recorded a discussion about the project, how it relates to their coursework, and volunteering in general.  

Mavbuddies helped me become more self-aware about my own identity.  Based on work earlier in the semester in HON 201, I had begun to realize what culture was, and the cultures with which I identify.  I had also begun to think about my role within those cultures.  Mavbuddies helped me become aware of some of the rules and boundaries within these cultures.  I started to become aware of how I enforce these rules and even some biases I had.  I wasn’t sure when I started this program how well I would be able to communicate with my partners.  All I knew was that English was their second language.  I was a little surprised at first how easy it was to have our discussions.  Before, I had a bias that people who spoke multiple languages would be harder to communicate with.  They also helped me to become aware of the culture here on campus.  One example of this is homecoming.  Leading up to homecoming and during homecoming week itself, they kept asking me what it was and why we celebrated it.  Before being asked this, I had never thought about the purpose of it.  I think it is so common that people here don’t stop to think about why we do it.  I believe that this is the case with other parts of the university culture as well.  Since everyone else in our culture is doing it, we join in without a thought as to why we are joining.

Other experiences have caused me to start asking questions about different cultures, but these were simple questions that barely scratched the surface of these cultures.  Mavbuddies caused me to seek out people from different cultures and gain a deeper, more complex understanding of my partners’ cultures.  They would ask me questions about some of the practices and perspectives of my culture that I hadn’t thought about before.  I would then ask them if it reminded them of anything from their culture.  We talked about some simple things, such as the difference between weather, landscape, and food, but we also had conversations about the reasoning behind different celebrations and perspectives of all of our cultures.  

I will still work to continue my education through experiences off-campus.  Part of the process through Mavbuddies was forced upon us, such as asking each other the bare minimum about the other’s culture.  However, we never went any deeper than surface questions.  In the future, I will try to ask more than just where they are from and how it is different from the culture here.  I struggled through this program because I had three students from different cultures at varying levels of English.  As a freshman, I did not have the knowledge how to navigate this situation quite yet.  This experience taught me a lot about finding different ways to communicate, and I hope to develop that in the future.