Growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, Olivia Atkins, a white, domestic Auburn University student, is not a likely candidate to be on the International Student Organization’s executive board.
But Kapish Batura, one of Atkins’ closest friends in ISO and fellow executive board member, said she has become fully immersed in the organization not just because of her open-minded approach and lack of preconceived notions, but also because of her not-so-domestic taste buds.
“I’ve noticed that spice tolerance is definitely one of the key components to forming a solid friendship with any international student,” Batura said with a laugh. “You got to have a high spice tolerance, and Olivia, hands down, has a really good one. She can hands down eat chicken curry like no one else.”
Being the only domestic student on the executive board, Atkins, in a way, has been able to simulate the experience of what it is like for a student from another country to come to Auburn with little understanding of the culture or ability to speak the language.
In the same way that an international student might feel completely out of place in Auburn, Atkins has gotten involved with an organization that made her the minority and feel foreign, even while going to school in the state she had lived in her entire life.
“I think anybody who is domestic that comes to social hour or a peace dinner kind of experiences that,” Atkins said. “A lot of people have never tried Nepalese food or anything like that.”
It was weird at first, she said, to be a white student feeling like a minority on a campus with a student body that’s nearly 70 percent white.
Atkins can still remember going to the first ISO social hour her freshman year with her roommate, knowing no one and not seeing many people who look liked like her.
“I remember we walked in, and we were like, ‘What are we doing here? Who do we sit with?’” she said.
They mostly stuck to themselves for that first meeting, but Atkins decided to come back, enticed by the idea of meeting new people and learning about new cultures.
“I think it’s just one of those things you go into, and your mind thinks things that aren’t actually true,” Atkins said. “I tend to overthink things a lot, so I was questioning it, but there was absolutely nothing to worry about.”
Atkins said she remembers telling her roommate at that first meeting that it would be cool to eventually become friends with international students, but neither one of them knew how.
Batura said it is a natural reaction for domestic students to feel intimidated when coming to an ISO event.
Atkins said she has gotten used to having to ask a couple times how to exactly pronounce someone’s name, but with so many nations represented and varying accents, even understanding someone in small talk can be difficult.
“For the very first time, it’s hard to get the names right for everyone,” Batura said with a laugh. “All jokes aside, communication is definitely an issue sometimes. Language barriers do exist, sadly.”
When asked if there’s ever a language barrier with some of ISO’s members, Atkins, who is only fluent in English, had an emphatic response.
“Yes,” she said, as if she had in a single moment remembered all the times she was sitting with a perplexed look on her face when she tried to understand what someone was telling her.
The language barrier was one of the reasons Atkins became good friends with Batura. Since his father worked on U.S. embassies all across the world, Batura had gained a higher proficiency in English than most international students have when they come to Auburn.
“At the end of the day, communication is the crux of civilization,” Batura said. “I met [Atkins] through a very wide network, but when I did, I immediately became friends with her just because of her personality. She’s very open, and of course, me knowing the language definitely helped a lot.”
Over time, Atkins became more and more familiar with regular attendees of the meetings, and she set goals to meet five new people at every social hour. She went from feeling somewhat alienated to completely forgetting she was the minority in the room.
“It’s a really cool experience because you don’t normally get to experience any of those cultures on a regular basis,” she said.
Because of this enthusiasm for other cultures, Sumaiya Islam, president of ISO, encouraged Atkins to run for a position on the executive board.
“We wanted her to be one of the faces of ISO,” Islam said. “We wanted people to say, ‘Hey, there’s a domestic student.’ ISO is actually for international and domestic students equally.”
Even though she became an active member in ISO, Atkins still felt hesitant to try to become a part of the leadership because of the optics of having a domestic student as one of the leaders of an organization that is overwhelmingly dominated by international students.
“It was really uncomfortable because I was the only one [domestic student],” Atkins said. “I don’t know. It was just weird. I think it was just mental, thinking that they don’t want a domestic student, which turned out to not be true at all.”
Islam, Batura and the rest of the executive board were thrilled when Atkins successfully applied for the position of treasurer. Prior to Atkins, it had been a while since there was a domestic student on the executive board.
“We were very excited about having a domestic student,” Islam said. “I do get a different perspective because we [people as a whole] think of a lot of things in one perspective only. But I get a different perspective from her, and she’s learning our perspective as well.”
Over the past year, ISO has made a conscious effort to bridge the gap between the international and domestic community, which is the main mission of the organization. Having Atkins in a position of leadership has allowed them to do so.
Batura said having a domestic student on the executive board has been a snowball effect for getting more domestic students to come to social hours. According to Batura, there has been an approximately 15 percent increase in domestic-student attendance.
Atkins said it came as no surprise to her parents when they found out she would be serving in her role. From studying German throughout high school to being involved with the International Buddy Program at Auburn, Atkins has always enjoyed the exchange of cultures as well as the beauty between different cultures.
Batura said Atkins, who is only a sophomore, is well past her years in terms of cultural awareness and outlook on life.
Atkins originally came to Auburn to major in international business, but she decided to study political science because it gave her more options and a natural path to law school, which has always been a goal of hers.
Atkins is not sure whether her professional career will keep her in America or take her abroad, but Batura is sure that no matter where she ends up, his high-spice tolerant friend will always truly be a global citizen.
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