Cole Hauser
School of International Liberal Studies (SILS)
Photo by ICC
As a new student at Waseda University on a student exchange program from the United States, I have many things I wish to do and one such thing is to meet many new people from different backgrounds. There are many ways to meet new people, however in my case, I found it a little difficult to meet people in my first couple of days since arriving in Japan. I suffer from social anxiety, so it is daunting to push myself to meet people with no pretense. Eventually I learned about the ICC during my orientation for my department. I knew that getting involved with university organizations is a great way to meet new people and as such I resolved to stop by the ICC lounge to see what they had going on, which upon doing so learned about events they had such as the Welcome Party or, topical for this article, the Welcome Café.
Upon arriving at the ICC lounge, where the Welcome Café was being conducted, I had to check in at the front and was then guided inside where I saw people conversing at different tables. Immediately I felt intimidated. If anyone reading this has social anxiety, then you should know that one of the worst feelings is having to pick a place to sit in a room of people you don’t know. Thankfully, I ended up being ushered to a random table by one of the ICC staff which took a weight off my shoulder and allowed me to calm my anxiety. After being seated, I met with other people as they came and joined the table, and we loosely followed an introduction guide provided at the table in order to start our conversation. It was a nice environment for introducing myself to others from all sorts of different places. Around halfway during the event the ICC staff began a “Rock, Paper, Scissors” event in order to win special stickers. Despite failing, it was still a fun experience which my table laughed about greatly.
A nice part about this event is that it didn’t really end upon leaving the ICC lounge. Four people I met during the event want to go to an actual café afterwards, so we all went together to the Uni Shop and Café to sit down and chat. Since 4 of us were foreign learners of Japanese and one of us was a native Japanese person, we decided to try and chat exclusively in Japanese in order to practice Japanese while having fun chatting with new acquaintances. After finishing there and chatting about Japanese slang that we didn’t know, we all decided to part ways for the night. This event gave me a nice confidence boost for the days that followed, which helped me with meeting even more people at other events. So, thank you to the ICC for setting up this event, which is perfect for new students trying to meet new people in a calm environment.
