CHAMPs help U.'s int'l students

For many incoming college students, living alone in a strange place can make for a difficult adjustment. For the more than 600 international students who come to Penn each year, however, adjusting to life in a foreign country only adds to this already bewildering experience. To help ease this transition, Penn's Office of International Programs has started CHAMP, the Campus Hosting and Mentoring Program. The program pairs each incoming international student with a Penn faculty, staff or student mentor. "The program tries to set up an informal friendship between the host and hostee," said Li-Chen Chin, one of OIP's advisors to international students and scholars. Chin said the program offers social activities to help the new students and their mentors get to know each other. Upcoming events include a "Talk and Taste" of Japan and a graduation reception. Many international students said they appreciate the program, which is designed to pair them with a mentor that shares their interests. "It's good to have someone at the University who knows about it to guide you," said Adrian Chiu, a College sophomore from Vancouver, British Columbia. "It makes things much easier for the new student." Many hosts also said that they enjoyed participating in CHAMP. "When [my hostee] got lonely or homesick, he would call me," said Jackie Decker, administrative assistant at the University Laboratory Animal Resources, who hosted a Greek graduate student. "I was almost like a security blanket he could fall back upon." Chin added that for many international students, coming to Penn was their first experience in the United States. The program is currently looking for hosts. Prospective mentors can pick up an application at OIP's office in Bennett Hall. "There's a certain flexibility involved with the program," Chin noted. Hosts are not responsible for picking up students, giving them housing or providing transportation. They do, however, have guidelines they are expected to follow. Hosts need to attend group gatherings, meet with students and attend receptions in the spring and fall. For many members of the University community -- which has one of the largest international student populations in the Ivy League at just over 3,000 total -- being a host can be an eye-opening experience. "I took him to an Italian market one day," Decker said of her hostee. "He was so open to a new culture, he just immersed himself in the culture and talked to everybody there. It was more enjoyable to see the market through his eyes." CHAMP hosts are volunteers and hostees are not required to participate in the program. The program stresses the formation of friendships between the partners. "Instead of having a host family program like many schools have, Penn has CHAMP," Chin noted. "It started as a student-to-student program, but it has come to involve the entire Penn community."