What do Cotton Eye Joe, cereal and limbo have in common? Between dances and dinners, mentors and first-years from different corners of the world found common ground over the little things in life at the four-day International Orientation program.
At Brown, international first-year students are offered the chance to attend the IO pre-orientation, where students are broken into groups of around 12 mentees — created by a computer algorithm to ensure diversity of backgrounds — and assigned to student mentors.
The four day orientation includes a combination of workshops, group events and staff meet-ups to facilitate community building among international students. Mentors keep in contact with their mentees throughout the year through the International Mentorship Program.
This year saw a 33% increase in IO participants compared to the class of 2027, with 320 international students hailing from 82 countries, with the top five being Canada, China, India, the UK and South Korea.
Despite the increase in participants, the number of mentors remained the same from 2023. Out of the approximately 200 students who typically apply to be mentors, only 26 students were selected — a number restricted by the program’s budget, which comes from the Division of Campus Life, Global Brown Center Assistant Director Ruby Cheng said.
This year, IO celebrated the 25th anniversary of IMP. The program’s “birthday party” was hosted on Wriston Quad. Maithili Parekh ’02, the founder of IMP, was the keynote speaker of the event.
Parekh discussed the reason she started the IMP program — to help students transition into college life in the US — as well as the importance of international student identity and the “assets they contribute to Brown University.”
Training for mentors included activities that focused on the saliency of identity. IO also collaborated with the Third World Transition Program for this year’s training. Within the IMP mentor cohort, there is a subcommittee for support for students of color, which will be responsible for further outreach with TWTP throughout the year, Cheng said.
“We reflected on our identities and the way they inform how we related to each other,” mentor Hania Khan ’27 said. “We saw how there were so many commonalities, despite the fact that there were massive cultural differences.”
During the Summer Contact lunch, Miora Andriamahefa ’26 connected with her mentees. She remembered sitting at one of the tables as an “observer,” excited to see her “mentees interact with each other and really get along.”
As a first-year in IO last year, Soujanya Aryal ’27 participated in the IMP Amazing Race, which comprises a series of competitions including a very intense game of limbo. Aryal’s competitor is one of his closest friends today.
Ruchika Bhuyan ’27 gave her summer contacts a tour of the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall, pointing to the soft serve and all-day cereal dispensers, which were key in case of jet-lag and a resulting later breakfast.
In the same dining hall, Khan connected not only with her mentees but with the students she had been assigned through the Summer Contact program, where mentors reach out to a group of freshmen with similar backgrounds to them over the summer. During the conversation, Khan told students about her American roommate, who taught her the Cotton Eye Joe dance. After dinner, Khan took her group to a classroom where she taught them the Cotton Eye Joe.
After game night, the new students participated in the same activities their mentors did years before them. They took the same night-time tours, participated in the same Amazing IMP Race and performed in the same IMP Talent show.
“We saw so many people come out of their shells,” said mentor Albert Lou ’26. “It felt like a really comfortable environment where people were so supportive of each other.”
