Buddy Family association, a young association which aims to find learning partners for foreign students, was established in July 2016.Under the guidance of Youth League Committee of Jilin University and the College of International Education, it is the only one association that provides a platform for international students and Chinese students to communicate in the form of one-to-one. It aims to build a bridge of friendship between students around the world, and to serve the foreign students and help them to deal with the problem about their daily lives and study. As for Buddy, it is a daily service item carried out by the College of International Education for helping foreign students of Jilin University. According to different situations of different students around the world, our association looks for and select students who can help them in their daily lives and common study from Jilin University, and then we allocate and match them so that we form a one-to-one partner.
Now our association has 49 members, yet so far we have recruited more than 360 buddies. And our association has 5 members of the presidium，6 departments under their leadership: Secretary Department, Propaganda Department, Planning Department, Technology Department，Life Department and Sports and Cultural Department. These departments cooperate together and every single part does its own job well. Not only do we help foreign students, but also we develop various abilities of the buddies and improve comprehensive quality of them.
Since its establishment, Buddy Family has been involved in a number of activities that Chinese and foreign students can take part in. Besides, before foreign students come to university, we organize them to make friends with Chinese students enrolled by email, which plays an important role for foreign students to adapt to the Chinese environment.
In the winter of 2016, we held some cultural sharing activities such as Eating and Food, Hand-making and Arts to let Chinese and foreign students experience different cultural customs of different countries. What's more, we organize Chinese Corner each semester regularly, which can arouse their interest in learning Chinese well and improve their Chinese as well. Through the help of their partners, the friendship between Chinese and foreign students developed and the cultural communication promoted, too. In addition, we held youth sharing class several times. Foreign students take these class as teachers by sharing their culture with Chinese students in an interesting and vivid way. Students can learn more about cultural customs and language habits of other countries in these class. Our association also participated in organizing Costume Ball of Jilin University, International Cultural Festival, Meeting between Chinese and Foreign Families and Reading Club. We gain a good reputation among college students through a series of elaborate interesting activities.
The WeChat official account of our association is BuddyFamily(WeChat ID: jlubuddyfamily)
Under the guidance of the College of International Education, our association is run by ourselves. The articles are posted in both Chinese and English. The content of the post are the advertisements of our activities, the summary of our activities, the introduction of living tips and some events about Jilin University.
