Food and Culture Festival tops bill at ‘International Week’

WITH its 3,000 overseas students from 120 nations and five continents, the University of Huddersfield’s International Week is an annual highlight on campus.  It is also one of the tastiest, because a popular centrepiece is a Food and Culture Festival that this year featured the cuisines of more than 30 countries.

Teams of students provided a wide variety of specialities from their homelands. And everything was eaten, because the Food and Culture Festival attracted an attendance of 600 in the University’s Oastler Building.  While the food was beings sampled there was entertainment in the form of singing and dancing from some 20 groups of overseas students.

International Week 2018 began with a World of Sport Tournament that included basketball, volleyball, table tennis and badminton.  There was also a ‘futsal’ (football) tournament, a games night, and the week concluded with an International Fashion Show that showcased styles from around the world.

Other events included a multi-cultural tea party hosted by the University’s network of international student societies, and a Hispanic Night that featured music, performance and food from Spain and Latin American, including a gig from Chilean guitarist Diego Castro.

The University’s Department of Linguistics held a Languages Matter event, exploring and mapping the huge variety of languages and dialects spoken by international students.

There was also an Enterprise Day, which offered help and advice to international students aiming to launch their own businesses and providing them with global insights.

International Week has been a fixture at the University of Huddersfield for eight years and is designed as “a coming together, celebration and showcasing of cultures,” states Alan Tobi, who is International Student Experience Manager.

“We very much value all our students at the University and feel activities and events like this develop a global mind-set and improve important key skills among them,” he continues.  “The international societies make a huge contribution to the week.  They are free and open to all students bringing strong benefits to our British students to be involved with opportunities to make new friends and improve cultural awareness.”

International Week is a highlight for UK-based students as well as those who come from overseas.  Business management student Jaden Ricky Clark said: “It gave me a platform to continue meeting passionate and pleasant students who drive to communicate, learn and interaction with absolutely anyone.  International Week connects people regardless of ethnicity and promotes differences while creating friendships, comradeship, and teamwork and is the most welcome a student could feel.”