By: Apoorvaa Mandar Bichu, Jessica Gonzalez, and Katie Mumm

It’s a busy afternoon at the Mike and Josie Harper Center; the building is filled with students’ laughter and the smell of freshly brewed coffee from Starbucks wafts through the air. Just like every other weekday, Pulkit Upadhyay, a final-year graduate student from India who is pursuing a dual MBA/MBIA degree, sends out a text to his other international student friends at Creighton. It’s a daily ritual to discuss group drama, sip some coffee and eventually get some homework done.

According to its official website, Creighton University has an international community that is tight-knit and diverse, hosting students from more than 45 different countries, such as China, Spain, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, India and the United Arab Emirates.

International students arriving at Creighton are hosted by the International Student Association. According to Cristian Craciun Brutten, a contributor at U.S. News, adjusting to life in the U.S. requires students who are adaptable. Creighton’s ISA helps foster the sense of community that students need in order to succeed.

 “ISA was the best thing to happen to me at Creighton,” Upadhyay said. “All the people that I spend time with every day I met through ISA. I made connections with people in the U.S. as well as from all over the world.”

Reflecting on his Creighton experience, Upadhyay says that the U.S. was his first preference when it came to selecting a place to pursue his further education, and he chose Creighton because he knew someone who worked at the university and was strongly recommended to study here. In the three years he has been here, Upadhyay says he has nothing but good things to say about the faculty and overall community at Creighton.

Conings (in the red dress, center-left) pictured with other international students at her first ISA banquet, held on Oct. 28, 2018.

As Joanna Conings, a graduate student from Belgium, pursuing a degree in English with a specialization in creative writing said friends “made everything easier” for her

“They became more family than friends to me and opened their houses to me for Thanksgiving, Christmas and every other break,” Conings said.

Conings’ story as an international student is even more unique because she happened to fall in love with an American student from Texas. Conings says Creighton hasn’t just helped her academically but has brought her “a new family and a love story of a lifetime.”

Another European student, Laura Higueras, a senior from Spain, was offered a spot on the Creighton tennis team. Higueras shared that the offer was hard to resist because Creighton’s tennis team is Division I and is ranked in the top 200 colleges of the U.S.. Higueras says that she came to Creighton with her own preconceived notions of what college life would be like. However, over the past four years, Higueras says she has learned how to balance her studies, her social life and tennis. Higueras is also an active part of the International Student Association along with Upadhyay and Conings.

“My Creighton experience would definitely not have been the same without the International Student Association,” Higueras said.

Upadhyay, Conings and Higueras’ stories are just three examples among the myriad international student experiences here in the U.S. Through our podcast, “Diving into Diversity,” we want to explore the stories of students who took the step of leaving their home countries behind to start a new chapter at Creighton. We hope to shed light on a small yet integral part of the Creighton community.