Foreign Aid

When a student from a foreign country arrives at Harvard, he is shuffled off with the University's best wishes to the International Student Center, where he meets more students from foreign countries. He is shown courtesy and is an object of interest, but there is no organized effort to help him integrate into the Harvard community and feel at home here, or to make him familiar with the customs and attitudes of the country he is studying in. There has long been a need for a channel of contact with American fellow students of similar academic and extra-curricular interests.

The organization that now attempts to remedy this problem, the Harvard International Activities Committee of the Student Council, plans to assist the foreign student in his first few days in Cambridge, and to follow up throughout the year with information on the ins and outs of Harvard life. During Orientation week in September social mixers and Crimson Key tours are planned, and later, arrangements for dinner engagements and weekends at local students' homes will hel pease the foreign student into Cambridge society. A particularly worthwhile part of the HIACOM plan will be to arrange for foreign students to stay in American homes over the holidays.

The HIACOM's intended projects merit enthusiastic approbation, and it is to be hoped that other international organizations at Harvard, like the UN Council will try to make life easier for the three hundred foreign students arriving here next fall by including them in their activities. Of course for the HIACOM program to be successful individual students will have to help. House Committee representatives will soon be soliciting for students to participate in the Orientation week and vacation plans, and students may offer their services on their own by contacting the Committee office at PBH. Harvard should respond to this effort to help integrate the isolated colonies of foreign students in Cambridge.