Crossing Cultures: My GPC Experience
Allison Kittinger
Global Friendships
As an introvert going into a large college, I knew that student organizations would be where I find my friends. It is much easier to form friendships with people who I know from the start have similar interests to me, because I can bypass small talk and get right to talking about topics that I know will keep both me and the other person interested. It takes away the stress of surface-level socialization. Because of my interest in Japanese culture and my starting coursework in the Japanese minor, I thought going to Japanese club would benefit me, and maybe help me find other people learning Japanese. Some of the members turned out to be in my same class. When I told one of them that I was also trying to learn Korean, she introduced me to Korean Conversation Club, and I started going there as well.
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I came to understand the countries I was studying more than I ever could have without reaching out to the Japanese and Korean communities on campus. I also have gotten job opportunities and career advice from some of the connections I made in these organizations. I have even been able at times to use what I learned to change some perceptions my Japanese and Korean friends had about each other's countries. I really felt like a part of these communities, which both helped me find my place on campus and provided me with a strong network of support. Choosing to experience other cultures through joining organizations related to them on campus both opens your mind and opens doors for you that otherwise would never even have appeared. Looking towards my future as a translator, I am so grateful that I have a network of people that speak the languages I want to translate in, with whom I can continue the cultural dialogue we started on campus.
During my time at these clubs, I made many close friendships, some of which became my closest friendships in college. On top of that, I was learning. I improved rapidly in Japanese and Korean, and had people that I could practice with. My education, however, did not stop with languages. I became immersed in the cultures and issues in the countries I was learning about, because I could talk to people who were actually from those countries. In addition to learning words from them, I would ask my Korean Conversation Club mentors (who are all native Koreans) questions I had about cultural and political issues. I became uniquely positioned between Japanese and Korean perspectives, learning about the thoughts people from both countries have on their long and contentious shared history, about which I had never learned in a class. I better understood their respective cultural differences as I learned about language differences, and I learned of surprising similarities in grammar and vocabulary between Japanese and Korean.
