Seventy-five UTRGV students and faculty attended a cultural awareness lecture by Justin Velten, the president of Go Culture International, last Wednesday in the University Ballroom on the Edinburg campus.
UTRGV International Admissions and Student Services hosted the event.
Velten is also a researcher of Go Culture International, a platform that helps individuals who transition cross-culturally to be more successful. He said two-thirds of the individuals who transition or relocate cross-culturally struggle at some point.
“We wanted to step in the middle of that and see if we could make a difference,” Velten said.
He said Go Culture International has been researching this for about 25 years.
UTRGV has about 60 different countries represented at the university, making up 750 international students.
Samantha Lopez, director of International Admissions and Student Services, said she makes it a priority to try to help international students transition to UTRGV smoothly. She also said she wants all of the students to be more culturally competent and aware of the diversity at UTRGV.
“We decided to invite him to bring a lecture of cultural competence in the 21st century,” she said. “We believe this is very important for all the UTRGV students to learn more about it.”
The lecture explained what it means to be culturally aware, competent and what international and domestic students, as well as faculty, could do to make UTRGV more inclusive
for everyone.
“Being culturally aware to me, has less to do with being aware with the culture around you; it has more to do with being adaptable, sensitive, and to being more inclusive,” Velten said.
He said he wants the UTRGV campus community to be more convergent with different people groups that have different cultural backgrounds instead of separating themselves from them.
“We no longer can think, ‘This is just the way I am, take it, or leave it,’” Velten said. “You’ve got to be adaptive, and we can’t assume that just because today I am around a group of people who are very similar to me that it will always be that way.”
Velten said a lot of other universities have a situation where there is a high percentage of a specific culture, such as UTRGV with a large Latino student population, at their institution. He said it’s a unique aspect that the university has compared to other schools.
He said he grew up in a similar monoculture back home in Missouri.
“I was, you know, like many of the students here, a first-generation college student,” Velten said. “I was brought up in Midwest Missouri, in a very monoculture. Most people at my school, we looked very similar, similar backgrounds so I can relate to an extent with the student body here.”
During the lecture, Lopez said the International Admissions and Student Services wants to implement the platform Go Culture International to assist with the transitions that international students might face and what campus community members could do to be more welcoming.
The Go Culture International platform gives an assessment of multiple factors. These factors help determine and create advice to improve the cross-culture transition international students may face when coming to UTRGV.
Sol Garcia, an English and mass communication freshman, attended the lecture and said she learned how individuals in other cultures at UTRGV might feel different from the vast majority of Latino students at the university.
“I actually found it interesting because I never thought of how other people who come to study here from faraway places, how do they feel? I feel that was very inconsiderate of me,” Garcia said.
She said with this new knowledge she received, she will be more accommodating to international students at UTRGV. The freshman said she will also check out the Go Culture Platform in the future to help expand her cultural awareness and help her in her plans to study abroad this summer.
Lopez hopes the Go Culture International platform helps with the transition of international students and also assists in building a better relationship between international and domestic student groups.
“I want to welcome all the students for the fall semester, domestic and international,” she said. “All of the services, specifically the events that we offer to the campus community, we offer to all of our students.”
