The International

This is a game that rewards patience and balance. You must think like a man of action and act like a man of thought. - from The International

Below is the text of a story that I wrote about International House for the SIPA newspaper. Enoy!:

A Week in the Life of an International House Resident
- Rebecca Burton, MIA - EPD

Chances are pretty good that you know a SIPA classmate living at International House – or IHouse as we affectionately call it. With about 50 SIPA students living here, we make up roughly 5% of the IHouse population and SIPA crowd alike. Most of our fellow students are very curious about IHouse and we are often asked, with some measure of doubt, whether or not we like living here. Why would we choose to go back to dorm-style living that so many equate with the undergraduate freshman experience? I think traveling through a week in the life of IHouse might shed some light on why we accept to share communal bathrooms and live in rooms slightly larger than shoe-boxes.

Residents can start the week off with salsa lessons in the pub on Mondays. On Tuesdays there is likely to be an ice cream social, a professional development event or a roundtable discussion about a critical global issue. Residents meet in the main lounge for ballroom dancing on Wednesdays, or they may opt to head to the gym for floor hockey. Language Exchange Night falls on Thursday, a chance to join a language table and practice your skills in the dining hall. Friday nights bring out the biggest crowd with Cultural Hours. These monthly events are planned, written and performed by residents to share dance, poetry, song, and other traditions from their countries. On Saturdays, study lounges fill up as students catch up on work or participate in the IHouse tutoring program for local elementary and high school students.

Sunday Supper is a bi-semester event that allows residents to don formal attire and sit down in the great hall for a meal together. At the last Sunday Supper I sat next to a journalist from Finland who recounted her adventures in travel journalism before we both fell quiet to list to the evening's speaker, Sophie Delauney – the Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders, USA. Following Delauney's words, there were performances by concert pianists from Israel, Romania, and Canada and an opera singer from the Czech Repulic. The evening didn't end with those performances, however. Residents were invited to continue festivities in the pub for Sunday evening jazz nights where there were special performances in honor of Black History Month.

Of course beyond the formal programming, residents are interacting and learning from each other all the time. I still remember the first floor party I attended here when I entered into an hour-long discussion about US race relations with a finance major from England and a teacher from Missouri (North Americans make up 30% of the population here). A few weeks later I engaged in an impromptu dinner discussion about stem cell research with a biology major from France and a political scientist from Italy. Following a Sunday night movie, I chatted about the director's techniques with a medical researcher from Ghana and a social worker from Venezuela.

In the end, living at IHouse offers many of the things that so many of us love about SIPA – a chance to study with and learn from some of the brightest people from around the world.