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Although the percentage of international students among total population has taken a light dip from last year, almost 11 percent of the student population is international; the students represent 70 different countries.

In response to the needs of the growing international student population, the Rice International Office has initiated many changes in the last few months, Director of the Office of International Students and Scholars Adria Baker said. They have moved from under the jurisdiction of the Division of Student Affairs and now report to the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Research. Besides the administrative change, the OISS has a new office in the Abercrombie Lab Building and new staff members. Sandra Rodriguez will serve as the international student advisor and Monica Mitchell is the office assistant.

"Our office provides a wide range of services for international students," Baker said. "Things that are mechanical for [students from the United States] are different when you're from another country."

International students must not only deal with harsher regulations imposed by the US government to maintain their student status, but they must also deal with an entirely new culture with, among other things, different foods, different laws and, for many, a different language.

The OISS therefore intends to help international students with everything from cultural adjustments to immigration issues, from opening a bank account and buying a car to maintaining student visas, finding a job and obtaining financial aid. "It's the minute things that are difficult and they're an unnecessary stress," Rice International Student Association President and Jones College junior Elena Bresciani said.

Both RISA, founded last year, and the OISS hope to reduce the additional stress that international students have by addressing the students' specific issues and needs. "Increased interaction between the international students is a priority," Bresciani said. "The undergraduate students are so dispersed, and the graduate students are so isolated, that there are very few opportunities for them to meet each other."

The organizations support activities designed specifically for international students to help them become a distinct group of people. As students who have undergone similar experiences, those who have been at Rice can help their peers deal with the continuing burdens of being thousands of miles from home.

Movie nights, outings to NASA, trips to the museum district and Thanksgiving dinner are a few of the events which RISA hopes to repeat this year.

This year, new goals include placing an international student representative on the Student Association Senate and hosting an International Festival Day.

"We were approached by an SA senator who was very interested in having an international student voice in the Student Association," Bresciani said. Although the representative would most likely not have a vote, "the whole point is for the voice to be heard," Bresciani said. "Issues that affect the student body also affect international students as well."

RISA and the SA have also begun collaborating to organize an International Festival Day, on which catered international buffets set up in the Rice Memorial Center would be accompanied by booths displaying information about the various countries represented by Rice international students.

"The international students are so cosmopolitan, you don't even know they're international," Baker said. "The undergraduates just get lost in the college system."

"The president has shown interest in internationalizing the university," Baker said. Besides on-campus, international student issues, therefore, an additional goal of the OISS and RISA is to promote Rice overseas.

"Students come over here from a lot of countries, and they don't know how great Rice is," Baker said. "They don't realize that they're at an extremely prestigious school. It's a significant disadvantage for Rice, because we're not as widely known. So we want to organize an outreach program to international advising centers so we can let the best and the brightest in the world know about Rice."

These overseas educational advising centers, sponsored by the US government, number over 400 and provide information on US higher education in over 150 countries. Baker hopes to utilize both international students as well as Rice students who study abroad to convey information about Rice to advising centers in their respective countries.

For more information, contact Wiess College sophomore Harsha Vaswani at tinoo@rice.edu.

This item appeared in the News section of the October 10, 1997 issue.