“My favorite part of Yale has been the community the international student body provides. For my first 3 years I was involved in OIS, which was one of the most wonderful & rewarding experiences of my time at Yale. There is something incredibly special about bringing together people from different parts of the world & seeing how quickly they grow close to each other-partly because they have the shared experience of being far away from home. Being part of the OIS team gave me the chance to both witness friendships blossoming & also to feed off the energy personally. Every year I partook in OIS I learned more about myself & how to better understand & support others.
Comparing my Yale experience to growing up in my native Greece, I feel the culture Yale promotes is different to the one I was raised in, in a way that, at times, made me feel out of place. I come from a place where people place their relationships to other people above all else. That was something I occasionally felt was missing from Yale as a whole but I always felt my international friends & mentors really understood me in that regard. Within the international community, I have never felt like I was putting more into my relationships than my friends were. It's been magical to meet people from such different backgrounds & yet not have to explain or vocalize the way you feel, because they just get you.
My family is very proud of the fact I am here. While I've personally loved being in such a different environment & think it's helped me grow in unexpected ways, it has also sometimes made me feel culturally disconnected from my family. However, being at Yale has made me appreciate them more & grow closer to them in a different way because, now that we live in different continents, we can no longer take each other for granted. There are a lot of times where I feel that Yale changed me in ways that prevent me from having the same kinds of relationships I once had with my friends at home. At the same time, it also taught me to be all the more intentional in my relationships because it has required so much more effort to maintain them in my life. - Sophia Catsambi, Yale College '19 #HumansofOISS
