With a year full of events, members leaving halfway through the year, and maintaining strong leadership, the International Student Association was able to hurl over barriers and end the year with pride. Like all groups there are always ups and downs, but as an organization and family, ISA reflects back on the year as a year to remember and looks forward to the future years ahead.
ISA is a student group that strives to bringing cultural awareness on campus through various events. ISA worked this year to bridge the gap between domestic and international students through the various events it hosted this year from iParty and International Week to its biggest event of the year, International Night.
As an organization that includes many international students, ISA primarily focused on forming a relationship among all students, and it hopes to form bonds with other groups on campus next year.
“We would love to work with the MCC and get a sense of culture,” ISA president Sandra Benny said. “We definitely would like to become an umbrella for different groups and become a resource for them. We have some good ideas that we would like to try.”
For various students in ISA it means more than just being involved in a group — it means sharing similar interests with others and forming bonds as well as teaching students about their cultures and coming together as one.
“ISA means family,” ISA vice president Ina Song said. “It’s a group of passionate people from different cities and countries that gather together and work with each other to reach the same goal. ISA is the place where I can always go to when I’m sad or happy because I know they will always support me.”
This year ISA was able to host various events and showcase different aspects of ISA. ISA hosted Social Butterfly in the fall where it welcomed students to the new year, Thanksgiving dinner to international students who didn’t have plans for Thanksgiving, International week and its weekly coffee hour session. With much planning ISA was able to get a lot of students involved in its events and strengthened its presence on campus.
“We had a great year compared to last year,” ISA fundraising coordinator Luca Lin said. “We had some great success this year and it was because of all the people involved in ISA. We had charismatic characters and had a perfect combination of international and domestic students. ISA had great sponsorship, we built our website, Facebook page and our publicity got us very known.”
As the end of the year approaches ISA has been generating ideas for next year on how it can strengthen ties between other groups and continue success as a group. Some ways ISA will be able to accomplish this is by offering and creating new positions as well as reaching out to student groups. ISA hopes to build more relationship with other groups and create new friends along the way.
“Next year we would like to build a strong international community through collaboration and charity events,” Song said.