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Graduate Business Association to Host Dinner Around the World for International, Domestic Grad Students

By Keith Morelli

TAMPA (April 6, 2017) -- Part of the appeal of the University of South Florida campus is its international flavor. Some 5,000 international students are enrolled here, along with 200 research scholars. Combined, they represent more than 145 countries.

Each of these students carries his or her own culture onto campus and part of that is the wide variety of food.

"There is nothing that quite brings people together like food," said Heather Davis, president of the Graduate Business Association, which is hosting the event.

The dinner begins at 6:30 p.m. this Friday (April 7) and all USF Muma College of Business graduate students and their families are invited.

"We are holding this dinner because we think it is important to expose our domestic students to the foods of other cultures and make our international students feel more at home," Davis said. "We expect around 40 students to attend. Generally at our events, we have some significant others in attendance as well."

This may be the first of many such get-togethers designed to mix domestic and international students as a way to better understand each other's culture, she said.

The Muma College of Business has a high proportion of international students.

"We are proud to be accepting and representative of this diversity on the GBA board," Davis said. "Four of our seven board members are female and three out of the seven are internationals. Two are naturalized citizens."

"We decided to do a 'Dinner Around the World' to bridge the international students to the domestic students," said Nadia Kaminskya, vice president of marketing for the group. "Food brings people together and we wanted to carry over the USF tradition of culturally diverse events to the GBA mission."