Emilia Kapuscinska arrived in Boston over a week before her classes at Boston University started, and a week before most of her peers. She stayed with her parents in a hotel room across the Charles River, one with a view of Warren Towers. She found her floor through the window and had her father take a picture of her pointing it out to excitedly post on Instagram. In only a few days, that would be home for the next several months.
I met Em for the first time less than a week after that picture was taken. Standing just over six feet tall and striking enough that she spent her first month in Boston reminding people that she was not a model, it would be easy for her to dismiss people or experiences being offered at the beginning of the semester. Despite this, she welcomed me into our small, overcrowded dorm room literally with open arms and an invitation to go out with her that night.
Em is from Poland, older than most other freshmen, and fluent in three languages. She constantly attracts attention- whether that’s because of her height and beauty or her genuine friendliness is anyone’s guess-- and loves meeting new people. If you ask me, she’s the life of the party. Always the most interesting person in the room, she draws crowds talking about the various countries she’s lived in and people she’s met.
But if you ask her, coming to America was a complete culture shock. After I’d watch her impress people with her experiences, she would be upset when we returned to our room, saying she just didn’t know how to talk to people and always felt out of place in those big social settings. We did our best to comfort her, but she went out less and less as the semester went on.
“It was really upsetting to see her like that,” our roommate Victoria Rocha said. “We all thought she was having such a good time, and we all knew how amazing she is. Realizing she felt that out of place was sad for all of us.”
The education section of usnews.com reports that two of the biggest challenges faced by international students are the cultural differences and making friends. These were definitely factors of Em’s first semester experience.
“I felt like after I talked about where I was from I had nothing else to offer in the conversation,” she said. “I had absolutely no idea how to navigate that. I just kept thinking, ‘things are so different in Poland!’”
Even so, we were constantly in each others’ space through our first semester. It’s hard not to be when you share a repurposed common room with three other people. It didn’t bother us too much, though. The four of us became friends in a capacity much closer than simply coexisting. We hung out, got meals together, talked about our classes, our friends, and our experiences. But when our first semester ended and we all went home, spread across three continents, it was almost complete radio silence from Em.
“I was kind of alarmed when I didn’t hear from her over break,” our other roommate Jenna LeFleur said. “You get used to hearing her talk, even if it’s in Polish on the phone, she’s still next to you, she was always around. To have that go to nothing for a month was weird.”
Shortly after we got back, Em told us she was going to be one of the founders and the president of the brand new Polish Student Association. I knew it was exactly what she needed to be doing.
“My sister started the Polish Student Association at Carnegie Mellon where she studies, so we figured it would be good if we both did that. And, being the president and founder is good on your CV,” she laughed when she first brought it up.
Even through her humor, it was clear it was important to her. She spent hours hunched over her laptop working on a proposal, and came to us for opinions when stressed over the shade of red to use for the logo.
“Well, the worst part is that we have to do it all formally… getting the whole constitution together, nobody is [interested in doing] that, so since I was the driving force to do this, I basically had to sit down and write it myself and have the other people come review it,” she said.
Regardless of the work required, she is excited to create a space for Polish students, and for other students to learn about Poland and its culture.
“When I went to the Turkish Student Association night, they had their food, and a bunch of different cultural things. I didn’t know a lot of these things about Turkey, and I feel like its a good way of showing the culture to other people,” she said. “I also felt like I was the only one from my area of the world, and I didn’t really have anyone to relate to the way [members of the Turkish Student Association] did, culturally.”
These cultural differences had much less of an impact on Victoria when coming to BU, but had an impact to a lesser extent in her junior year of high school, when she went to a Long Island private school called Ross.
“Moving to America at first was hard, especially being so far away from home for so long,” she said, “but it was actually a really great practice for coming to BU. It made me feel a lot better, knowing that some people from Ross were already here and that I had a safety net of friends.”
Even beyond those Ross friends of all nationalities, there is a much larger Brazilian population on campus than there is a Polish one. It felt like everywhere we went that first semester, Vic found anyone who spoke Portuguese in a hundred foot radius, something Em didn’t get to experience.
Hopefully, what Em is doing will prevent future classes from the challenges she faced by creating an official Polish community.
“The Turkish girls had Turkish people, and Vic had the Brazilians, you know, and obviously the Americans are similar enough,” she said. “Cultural alienation was one factor that made my first semester kind of hard.”
The people Em is looking for are certainly out there. The official website of the Polish Fulbright organization reports that the amount of Polish students studying in the United States went up almost 9% between the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years. This is also something she is well aware of.
“I know how I felt, and there are not many Polish students in general. For incoming freshmen, since this is more and more of a trend, I’m sure they would be up for signing up, which I know I would’ve done if there was one. I’m partially doing it for me, but I’m hoping to start something which will be around for a long time.”