On Saturday, April 11, International Student Life (ISL) hosted its 30th annual International Fest in the Kracum Performance Hall and Weitz Commons. International students from a myriad of different countries showcased music and dance performances from their culture, led activities and served homemade food.

International Fest is ISL’s most labor-intensive event of the year, so its planning committee began preparations for it well in advance of the actual date. This year, the event was held during the second weekend of spring term — rather than later in the term, as was typical in past years — causing the planning committee to make a number of logistical adjustments. 

“This is one of the most important events for the Office of International Student Life throughout the whole year, so we started thinking preliminarily about it in the fall,” said Sarah Wang ’28, who served as chair of the Activity and Outreach Committee of the International Fest planning committee. “We started our outreach and organizing in the winter when we sent out interest forms for performances and food to campus announcements and also different multicultural communities on campus, especially the International Student Committee.”

In addition to contacting students interested in being involved with the event, the planning committee had to coordinate with Carleton’s administration to ensure the festival ran smoothly. “It was kind of hard because towards the end of [winter] term, everyone was really busy, but then during and especially over spring break we were sending out a lot of emails and follow-ups to people,” said Rahim Hamid ’26, who served as chair of the Performance Committee. 

Coordination with the Carleton Student Association (CSA) was also important because CSA provided funding. “We pay for ingredients for students to cook and bring their food in, and I think it’s really cool that we have the ability to do that,” said Hamid. 

Nearly all the food served was prepared by the students themselves. While this added a personal touch to the event, it also posed some logistical challenges. In particular, it meant that students from countries that have a smaller international population at Carleton had less support in preparing for the event. “We have a lot of Japanese [international students] here, so the process of cooking and serving the food was really smooth,” said Asuka Itokawa ’29, who volunteered with the Japanese group in ISL. “But other countries, like Singapore and Lebanon, had only two students each, so it was hard for them to cook actual food.”

Performances, activities and variety of dishes served were all chosen carefully as students decided how to best highlight both their own cultures and the overall spirit of the festival. Wang, for example, performed a traditional Chinese dance to the classical song “The Silk Road.”

“This classical dance is called dunhuang dance, which is very specifically influenced by the Buddhist culture in Western China at an intersection with other cultures […] you can observe a lot of Buddhist elements, a lot of Hindu, and a lot from places like Nepal and Tibet, and so it’s really a representation of a great diversity of different cultures clashing together,” said Wang. “So I think it’s very pertinent to the theme of this festival, like how great artistry can be formed through communication between different cultures.”
Many of the students involved in organizing International Fest shared their appreciation for the attendees. “There are not a lot of opportunities [in daily life] to actually notice how many people are here from different countries, so I think International Fest is very meaningful for me because you can really see how multicultural of a space and community this college is,” said Itokawa. “International Fest is kind of like a symbol of that multiculturalism.”

“International Fest as an international student is one of the few times where, and speaking for myself, where I feel as though we’re not just seen as an extension of the domestic student population,” said Hamid. “Everybody has various levels of assimilation when they come to Carleton based on whether there are a lot of other people in their nationality, if they speak the language really well, if people can tell they’re not from here.”“There’s a lot of different engagements with that, but I think that all sorts of falls away when you have a performance — and I’ll say performance because that’s what I work on — dedicated to highlighting the beauty of the difference between international students and domestic students—we’re not just sort of defective Americans, but we’re people in our own right with our own histories and our own cultures,” they added.