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Spartan Transfer Hub is a podcast for transfer students at Michigan State University, and beyond, brought to you by the Transfer Student Success Center (TSSC).
Each episode features conversations with MSU staff, faculty, and fellow students, highlighting key resources, programs, tips and individual stories to help you navigate your transfer journey. From academic support to campus involvement, Spartan Transfer Hub connects you to the tools and people that make a difference.
Find us on Impact89fm.org, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more!
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/msutransfersuccess
Website: https://spartantransferhub.transistor.fm
You're listening to the Spartan Transfer Hub brought to you by MSU Transfer Student Success Center and Impact eighty nine FM. Here's what we've got for you today. Welcome back to another episode of the Spartan Transfer Hub podcast brought to you by Impact ADN FM and the MSU Transfer Student Success Center. I'm your host, Sadi Chawbe. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm a senior studying journalism and communication.
Speaker 1:And as you know, this podcast is all about helping transfer students feel supported, informed, and confident as they navigate life here at Michigan State. Today, we're excited to highlight something very special happening on campus, Omiya and the upcoming Unity Dinner, an event centered around community connection and celebrating our our diverse Spartan community. To help us dive in, I'm joined by some incredible guests from OMEA. Thank you so much for being here, and would you like to introduce yourselves?
Speaker 2:Hello. My name is Samuel Saldivar. I use he, him, and Leo's pronouns, and I am the director of the Multicultural Center and the director for the Office of Multicultural Enrichment and Advocacy, also known as OMIHA.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone, my name is Juan Flores. I use he, him, and pronouns, and I am a Student Success and Community Initiatives Coordinator here in the OMIA office at the EMCC.
Speaker 1:Awesome, and before we start, I have a fun icebreaker. When you're away from home for the holidays, what is one small thing that you do that instantly makes you feel connected to home again?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a great one. I was not ready for that question. I I think one of the things that I do is I will actually this is really it might sound silly, but I spent some time drinking coffee from my father's mug. He passed away in 2014. And when he would come to visit with my mom, he had a special camouflage mug that he would drink his coffee in, and he forgot it one year.
Speaker 2:And, I think I've put it away in our cupboard, and I will pull it out every now and then, particularly around the times when I miss them or what around the holidays. And I will actually drink my morning coffee from that mug. So it's good family practice.
Speaker 1:That's a
Speaker 3:that's a good question. Difficult question for me because it takes me back to when I was a college student away from home and nowhere to go for the holidays because I was homeless, I didn't have anywhere to go. I came from a single parent household and it was tough growing up, so we didn't really have resources to celebrate holidays. And I always longed for having such festivities around the holidays, and so I made it a point to try to have that one day when I grew up, and so I have it now. But I'm still connected to this homiesgiving dinner.
Speaker 3:But one of the things I used to do was I would identify friends who were in the residence halls that didn't go away for the holidays, like the founder, Filippo Lopez, he was one, he was from Texas, and we connected in 1825, remedial math, freshman year, and then became friends. And he's the one that had the courage to go knocking on doors. But what I would do was, we would, I would find friends that were in Acres Hall, and we would meet in the lounge and play Halo on the Xbox, and just hang out all day and not worry about anything. And so that's kind of like what I would do. I would surround myself with community who are also here.
Speaker 3:And I would do that every year until we started this Homies Giving event, and then we would do this instead.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Usiti, what do you do that helps ground you during a holiday?
Speaker 1:What I really try to do is, like eat a lot of Indian food. I think that just makes me feel right at home. I'll try to cook it, I'll stay on call with my mom the whole time and she'll be like, you're doing this wrong, but it's whatever it is, like, I I feel like food is, like, a big thing for me, and it takes me right back.
Speaker 2:Nice. Thank you for sharing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Thank you both for sharing. Okay. So let's dive into the main questions. For students who may not know, what is OMIHA and the community you serve here at MSU?
Speaker 2:So OMEA is the Office of Multicultural Enrichment and Advocacy. As a office or a unit under that name, we're actually fairly new, but the office itself has existed for over fifty years. Before we were OMIHA, we were known as OCAP. Yep. It's a cultural and academic transitions.
Speaker 2:And before that, we were known as OMSA. Then before that, we were known as ORISA. And all of those are acronyms for office of Minority Student Affairs. And over time, we have undergone a transition. And OMIAA, as it's currently known, Office of Multicultural Enrichment and Advocacy, works to help and support Spartans from across campus who come from diverse and varied backgrounds.
Speaker 2:So one of the commitments we have is to ensure that we create a space here that fosters student success by focusing on belonging. And sometimes you hear that word belonging, and you understand it generally to mean, oh, a space where people feel like they can come and feel comfortable. We actually focus on five specific things. We call them the five c's. Connection, communication, community building, collaboration, and coalescence.
Speaker 2:We feel that focusing on one of these five things helps us establish that sense of belonging for students, where if I feel like I can communicate with other Spartans, if I feel like I can be in community with other Spartans, if I can build collaborative opportunities with other Spartans, I belong. I I'm in this space where I feel that I can call that space my own. That's one of the things we strive for here in Obeah. So talking about the Unity dinner today is one of those intentional practices that the team and I here really try to establish. We also do another program at the beginning of the year known as Spartan Remix.
Speaker 2:Spartan Remix is one of those collaboration opportunities that the team and I and Omiya work on to ensure that students are connecting with one another and resources across campus as well.
Speaker 1:I love Spartan Remix. Okay. So the holiday season can be tough for students, especially those who are far away from home. How does Omidyah help create a sense of belonging during this time?
Speaker 2:So this goes back to the five c's I just mentioned. Right? We work to figure out programming and learning opportunities and community building opportunities that invite Spartans to connect with one another. So in this case, for example, the unity dinner is an opportunity to connect around food. Right?
Speaker 2:So, if you have the opportunity to join us or have joined us in the past, you will notice that people will sit across from each other at a table and start dialogues, about perhaps food, about perhaps geography, about family histories. But what we try to do here is we try to build a community connection that can lead to belonging. We we foster a space where through food, in this case, students get to know one another, throughout their time here. We've also had other programs, one, ironically, food known as cultural cuisine and connections, where students get to learn about the histories of particular foods or particular community recipes, and then we get to try it. Last year, we had a fantastic program called Roots and Recipes, where members of the native and indigenous community, got to share the history of their recipes and history of community building before we got to gather around food and just get to know one another better.
Speaker 3:I'd like to mention too that on Monday, we are collaborating with the Inclusive Campus Initiative led by Doctor. Megan Khozar, and that event's going to take place here in the living room and in the multipurpose rooms from six to eight p. M, and all students are welcome. There are going to be many interactive activities and some student organizations tabling as well, And they're gonna get an opportunity to engage in a variety of activities and make connections with people. There's gonna be a karaoke whole gratitude tree, where students will get a chance to write down something that they're grateful for on some different clippings, and then connect it to this tree and contribute to building, putting leaves on the tree, gratitude leaves.
Speaker 3:So everyone's invited to that. You all can follow the ICI on Instagram and participate in any and all of their activities. They're a very unique initiative where they try to be the bridge between students, faculty, staff, and higher level administration at MSU.
Speaker 2:And that's not the only event, right?
Speaker 3:No. There are many more.
Speaker 2:But they have quite a few events. That's a that's a great connection.
Speaker 1:But I'm glad to hear that. Let's talk about the Unity Dinner. What is it, and what inspired this event?
Speaker 3:Okay. That's a great question. So long ago, twenty three years ago, to be exact, myself and Felipe Lopez, a student on campus who used to work for this office, at the time it was known as ORISA, Office of Racial and Ethnic Student Affairs. We used to work for the office as minority aides, and now they're known as ICAs. And we stayed on campus during every holiday, except for maybe Christmas.
Speaker 3:That was a longer break, and we had to leave the residence hall, so we had to go somewhere. And on Thanksgiving in particular, we didn't have anything to eat, so every residence hall, dining hall was closed, not just on Thanksgiving Day, but the entire weekend. So Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Well, Sunday they opened back up through dinner. But those three days, students who remained on campus were responsible for finding food on their own and spending money to buy that food.
Speaker 3:And Felipe and I were first gen students with part time jobs on campus and no financial support from anyone at home. So we had to fend for ourselves. And we would get together with friends and just kind of pitch in and buy whatever we can afford, from Meyer quality dairy, from anywhere. We would have one big meal at this one Chinese buffet that was right on Hagedorn and Grand River, I forgot the name of it, maybe. I forgot the name of it, but we would go there maybe once that break and eat.
Speaker 3:I believe sophomore year, Felipe had this grand idea, and this was during one of our Halo tournaments with whoever was in Acres Hall at the time. He had this grand idea to go and knock on doors where all his students lived. So we had these lists of students that lived in residence halls that we were responsible for doing outreach to, And we would have to check-in on them weekly to make sure that things were good, and just offer resources. And he had students in Hubbard, Acres, McDonald's, pretty and much the East Side. So, he went knocking, and he invited me, and I was like, I'm not knocking at any.
Speaker 3:I just couldn't do it, right? I'm like, I'm not knocking at any door, but I'll pitch in. And he went knocking, he and was able to gather a bunch of students, and so we ended up having about 30 students show up to the East Acres Lounge, and then we made some runs to Meijer. Somebody drove, had a car, so we went and bought a bunch of food at Meijer, cooked, ready to eat food. And then we just kinda put it over the heater vents.
Speaker 3:So, look at that heater vent right there, except they're bigger. They were about 18 inches deep, and they were releasing heat. So, we put all the trays on top of the heat to keep it warm all day, and we just ate throughout the day. And that became the first time doing it, we called it homiesgiving, was just a bunch of homies together. Homies means friends, means, you know, colleagues or family.
Speaker 3:And so he called it homies giving. And then the year after, he he suggested we do it again. And I was like, I'm committed. Let's do it. Let's make it happen.
Speaker 3:So we held it again in Acres Hall, and then we both graduated and were able to take it to grad school. We both got admitted to the social work program here on campus, and we joined the Latino Social Workers Organization. They gladly took it on, and we continued to offer it. Social work funded most of it. And then after that, we graduated from our master's.
Speaker 3:CAM funded it for a few years. And then I came over to work at this office in 2010, and they graciously welcomed it. So I became the point person to coordinate that event. Then eventually MSU found out, and they were like, hey, you're gonna offer this, because it kept getting bigger and bigger every year. And they said, you're gonna offer it, it has to be it has to follow all of the food safety guidelines.
Speaker 3:And they graciously also committed to funding it. So it's been offered ever since. That's grown from 30 to several 100 to now, right now, we have over 600 people registered.
Speaker 1:My gosh, that's amazing. That's really exciting.
Speaker 2:In the last couple of years, we've had over 800 folks show
Speaker 1:up. Wow.
Speaker 3:So when they eat good too, we get this very diverse spread of food. We get the traditional Thanksgiving. A lot of students that attend are international students. None of them celebrated Thanksgiving before, so they don't know what they're getting into aside from what they've seen on TV or read about. So we explain the history behind Thanksgiving, and they get a chance to try some halal kosher.
Speaker 3:Now halal, now kosher. Prior to it getting so big, we didn't offer halal or kosher because we just didn't have the funds for it. But I think five years ago, we started offering it. And they got a chance to try that food and then also the American traditional. And we're also, you know, very, very grateful to all the restaurants that cater, that offer to cook on Thanksgiving Day because a lot of clothes for the holiday, and they're willing to deliver cook it, deliver it, and sometimes even give us a discount on food.
Speaker 1:That's wonderful. I love that story. Yeah. Okay. What can students expect at the unity dinner?
Speaker 1:Food, activities, performances, give us the rundown.
Speaker 3:We rely on volunteers. We're also grateful for that. We have over 30 volunteers this year. Actually, every year, we've had over 30 volunteers. We've now had families volunteer every year that whose kids are now volunteering.
Speaker 3:So we've seen them grow up, right, like Briella and there's another family, the Friedhofs. She's a, I believe a doctor at the College of Human Medicine. Her, her husband, her kids, they're all in high school now. They've been volunteering for about five years. So it's also good to see them come and help out with sera, serving, and clean up and ushering food to replace the food that gets eaten.
Speaker 3:So people can expect a long line. We try to move as service fast as possible. There's going, there are going to be two separate lines. There will be one line for the kosher and allow food, and there will be another line down the middle again, for the traditional Thanksgiving, the mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, ham, peas, cornstuffing, all of that. And they can also get a second plate if they wish, desserts also, we're going to offer some homemade pies from the MSU the MSU bakery store.
Speaker 3:And that's all we can afford. Oh, we also put on the Lions game on TV. Someone's always able to find it with some kind of login to the BSN. So there's so because that's another thing too is that on on on Thanksgiving Day, a lot of families the American tradition involves football, American football, and good food and family. So we try to offer that.
Speaker 3:Pods, they'll get a chance to sit with friends and with people they may or may not know. Yeah. If you wanna
Speaker 2:add There in the past, we've had activities for kiddos to do as well because one of the things we we noticed is that folks would bring their families. There's an opportunity to come as a family. So we try to have some activities or resources for kiddos to also engage with. We also have a diversity of food because we have a diverse community. So for example, this year, we're going to have some barbecue style food as well.
Speaker 2:We're gonna have some Latinx identifying food as well as the traditional Thanksgiving Asian. Sides. Yeah. We're gonna have a pita community food as well. So what we try to do is just create a space where while we can't provide all of the comfort foods, we try to provide food that community can connect with.
Speaker 2:Right? So from a food perspective, I've always been really grateful for the effort Quanta's put into creating a menu that reflects, in some ways, the diversity of the communities we're connecting with often, and then building community through things like activities and sometimes a sporting event. A couple years ago, wasn't it it was a soccer it was it was some sort of soccer match that was on. It was an international I think it was, like, Euro Cup or something. It was Okay.
Speaker 2:So it it's just there's always something going on on the screens as well that's pretty neat. But, yeah, I just Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know the reason why we made it a very diverse spread cuisine is because one of the things that I noticed was that a lot of lot of low income students that don't have just extra cash, you know, laying around are hesitant to purchase food that they've never tried before. And what I've noticed over the years is that when they see something like Thai food, noodles, or some type of Pan Asian, or Latino tamales, or some of the Southwest barbecue, or some of the food we offer, they see it, and they're willing to try it. And then once they try it, they're like, Woah, what is it? Where can I get it? I'm definitely getting this next time I see it somewhere.
Speaker 3:So that, to me, that was a beautiful thing because now we're also, what is it, expanding their palate, you know what I mean? And it doesn't cost them anything. You should see their plate. Sometimes there's so much food that it just ends up getting piled on, right? We're like, let's take it easy.
Speaker 3:Can't fit it all in one plate, right? So they'll go eat and then they'll come back around and get some more.
Speaker 1:I love that. Especially because I just mentioned I love food and I love trying other cultural food too. Okay. Is the event open to all students, including transfer students, how can they get involved or RSVP?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's open to all MSU students. We're not gonna turn anyone away either, you know. One year we had LCC students who were thinking about transferring to MSU also attend, because they didn't have anything to do. So we welcome them. And there's a link on our Instagram that they can register through.
Speaker 2:The only answer.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And we also put together an invitation to fly with a link that we shared on all the listservs on campus that we could think of, and we asked our campus partners to distribute that far and wide. So if it ends up on someone's newsletter, hopefully they see it somewhere. And if not, they can always call our office, give us their email, we'll email it to them. We also have it in signage outside.
Speaker 3:So with a QR code so the students can just scan their phone scan the QR code with their phone and and register. And same thing with volunteers. We were we put a call for volunteers until last Friday, and we had over 30 sign up. So it's easy. Real easy for them to sign up.
Speaker 3:And then we also ask if they're bringing a puzzle on our plus tool, and they can let us know through that registration. Awesome. Which they have.
Speaker 1:When is the dinner?
Speaker 3:Thanksgiving Day, November 27 from twelve to two p. M. Okay.
Speaker 1:Why is community building so important, especially around holidays and final season?
Speaker 2:I think one of the reasons why we're so invested and committed to programs like the Unity Dinner, like Remix, like Cultural Cuisine, is because we understand that community building is an important part of this attempt at creating that space for belonging. What we've noticed, through our work and what the data is suggesting is that when we create opportunities for students to feel like they belong, they have higher persistence and retention rates. So, if we can create and foster spaces where students feel like they can be more of themselves and they feel like they can connect with others over space and place, they actually feel more comfortable in other areas connected to, in this case, MSU. So if I feel like I belong in a space like the MCC, if I feel like I belong in a space like Brody during the unity dinner, right, then I'm I'm more likely to feel like I'm a bit more comfortable in classroom settings and other social settings across campus, and that increases our opportunities for persistence and retention. But for me, what I'm most grateful for is the opportunity to have a unity that are so close to finals.
Speaker 2:Finals are stressful. Like, I I I still have memories of finals when I was an undergrad and in grad school. And if there's an opportunity to create an event for students, to host an event for students to just put a pause on the studying, on the preparation, on final exam thoughts. You know, if there's an opportunity for us to connect before the midnight stream, right, around food and around community, I I think we would do our best to make that happen as many times as we could. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So I think at least for me, I think it's so important because it's the community that sustains us. If I feel like I'm in a part of a community that I I feel more comfortable and more, I might feel more capable of addressing my finals in a better mood. I might feel more confident, as the semester ends. So we we try to to create those opportunities.
Speaker 3:Juan, I don't Yeah. For me, it's about giving students who remain on campus, who may be low income, who don't have means to go home, who don't have a home to go to, who are out of state or international, at least one delicious meal amongst Spartan family. Because having been on the other end, where didn't have anywhere to go, know what it's like to just be isolated, and with no one around, and no one coordinating something that brings people together with intentionality, it can be tough. And so here, we do all the work for them. All they have to do is come, get their food, sit down in a table, table pod with someone they may or may not know, and then by the time they're done eating their food, they're gonna have met someone, and they're gonna be part of the vibe, the the warm welcoming vibe.
Speaker 3:And so food insecurity is very real for a lot of students out here, especially on campus, especially right now with the current economy, the way things are in in our nation. And so if they can save some money and they come and get some delicious food, fill up for the day, to me it means a lot, you know, to be able to offer something like that. No one should be home alone that day, you know, and they're trying to figure out what to eat.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for the work that you do, and thank you for supporting us and uplifting us. And to all of our transfer Spartans listening, community is for you too, and you should know that. Events like the Unity Dinner are here to help you find connection, support, and people who truly get you. If you enjoyed this episode, tune in on Spotify and Apple Podcasts or the Impact eighty nine FM website and more. We hope to see you at the Unity Dinner.
Speaker 1:As always, keep showing up, keep growing, and keep making MSU your home. Go Green.
Speaker 3:Hawaii.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to the Spartan Transfer Hub brought to you by Impact eighty nine FM and the Transfer Student Success Center. See you next time.