All in the Family

People slowly filter into the Adams Junior Common Room on a sunny Saturday morning. Old Boston types clad in bow-ties and jackets and young families sporting multiple shoulder bag worth of childcare equipment all grab refreshment and settle into the plush couches to convene with their adopted first-year students. This is one of the four events thrown each year by the Freshman Dean’s Office for participants in the Host Family Program.

According to the program description, the Host Family Program matches first-years (both international and domestic) with alumni, faculty, administrators, and other Harvard affiliates in the area. It works to facilitate informal but useful relationships between students and host families that share an interest or some aspect of their respective personal backgrounds.

A Middle Ground

For Cansu Çolakoğlu ’16, Lori and Christopher Wadsworth, her host parents, were invaluable in the transition from her native Istanbul to Cambridge. The Wadsworths, in general, only take students from Turkey, where they spent several years.

“[The Wadsworths] represent a middle ground between my culture and the environment that I’m in here because they are from here and they’ve lived in this environment their whole lives, but they’ve also lived in my country, and they obviously have very strong feelings for Istanbul,” says Çolakoğlu. “At first, I didn’t always know what was acceptable to say and what wasn’t. On that scale, they provided with me with a very unique perspective that allowed me to learn way more about this culture than I would’ve without them.”

Reema M. Khan, host parent of Marija Jevtic ’18, a freshman from Serbia, is similarly eager to provide her student with a sort of cultural middle ground. Khan is hoping to introduce Jevtic to the family of her elementary school son Farooz’s classmate from Serbia.  “It’d be a great opportunity to get her involved with the Serbian-American community here,” Khan says.

Easing the transition into a new environment is also a central focus for host parent, Anne Licciardello ’80 as well. A middle school social studies teacher, Licciardello believes the program is extremely useful because “a college freshman’s not that different from that of  a seventh grader; they’re both in big moments of transition.”

Matchmaker, Matchmaker

The task of matching some 160 first-years with 115 host families falls squarely on the shoulders of Torey E. Martin, a Freshman Programs Assistant at the FDO.

“We have an application for hosts and students, and they fill it out individually; it just asks a lot of information that helps me pair: What their ideal Saturday might be, what they’re looking for in a host,  [if] they want to be paired with hosts that may have children or have animals or things like that, what their religious affiliation might be,” says Martin. “The hosts fill out a similar application. It’s all done by hand, so I read all of the applications. It’s similar to what the resident deans do with the housing application.”

According to Martin, the process of downloading the applications, printing them, reading them, matching them, and emailing the results takes upwards of 60 hours.

“It’s quite laborious, but it works,” Martin says. “And it’s been a really neat experience for me to watch when the pairing works well, and they form a bond and have stayed together.”

Moving on up

All signs seem to indicate that the process of matching might take even longer in subsequent years given the growth of the program. “When we took the program over from the OSL  [within the last 10 years] I believe it only had about 30 student participants and we’re now up to about 160,” Martin says. “So the program has grown quite a lot which is great, and we’re continuing to add more programming events.”

A central part of the growth has been an increased interest in the program from American students. “I think it’s becoming more and more common that domestic students are asking for host families,” Martin says.

In order to match the rising demand on the student side, the FDO has been eagerly recruiting new host families. “We have a lot fewer hosts than we do students, so we’re trying to get that to be a little more even, so we’re not relying so heavily on people to take on multiple students,” says Martin. “This year, we’ve tried some new recruiting tactics and have reached out via the all-College staff list that we have here to recruit from the current staff and faculty and administrators, so that we’re not just utilizing the alumni network. We’re always looking for new ways to grow the program, as you can see by the numbers.”

Khan, an administrator at Harvard, is one of these new recruits. “Being in administration, I don’t get to interact with the students as much. The Host Family Program helps me get closer to the University’s mission in that respect,” Khan says.

Mutual Benefit

Martin was quick to emphasize the benefit to the hosts as well as the students. “[The hosts] just love to be involved and be with the students. They do it all for free, so they’re volunteering their time but they learn so much from the students,” Martin says. “That’s what they love.”

In fact, Lori Wadsworth herself got the experience of being hosted when Çolakoğlu invited her to Istanbul over the winter break of her sophomore year. “One of my favorite moments was when Cansu invited me to come to Turkey,” says Wadsworth. “And I kept saying ‘Cansu, you don’t need me in your life in Turkey.’ And she says, ‘No, I really want you to come and stay with my parents.’... I went over and she was my Turkish interpreter for the whole week, and we had so much fun. It was a highlight for me and she was wonderful. You know as well as I do that she had better things to do with a month off, but it was so fun.”

Çolakoğlu was similarly enthusiastic. “Now, I literally think of [Wadsworth] as my grandma, and she keeps calling me her daughter and we just met two years ago,” Çolakoğlu says.

Although, there are stories like Wadsworth and Çolakoğlu’s, many of the host-student relationships are less involved. Wadsworth herself has had multiple students who have fallen out of touch after the first few meetings. Often, after the first year, students don’t feel the need for a host family.

“It depends on the student as to what they need or what they want,” Wadsworth says. “And we always say to them, ‘we’re here for you, you’re not here for us. You owe us nothing.’”