(by Filipe Albessu Narciso) – June 10th, 2021

USP iFriends is a collaborative volunteer program directed primarily towards higher education students. Its first edition dates back to 2011. The program is based on the well-known Buddy System, in which volunteer local students assist exchange students with their questions and issues concerning their new lives in a different country. At the time, the program only counted officially with on-campus activities. Lasting six months per edition, the method was a success until the second half of 2019.

With the start of the coronavirus pandemic, higher education institutions in Brazil cancelled most of their in-person activities. This unplanned major disruption is still up, having full impact on programs such as iFriends. As a consequence of the pandemic, academic mobility at USP has been suspended and the institution isn’t receiving new international students. Consequently, the program had to be renewed under this new context, relying on a different arrangement, different objectives and a new target audience.

According to Rafael Dall’olio, iFriends coordinator, the virtual edition of the program has the main objective of finding a way to maintain cooperation among students in a year without any mobility, national or international. With that in mind, the profile of the program was modified and it distanced itself from the Buddy System model to become a lighthearted program that aims at sharing academic knowledge and maintaining language practice. “The nature of USP virtual iFriends is carefree. There are no evaluations or grades, it is only supposed to be an open space for conversation and exchange”, said the coordinator of the project in an interview in Portuguese.

Nowadays, the program accepts students, professors and general university professionals from every higher education institution in Brazil. The first virtual edition took place in the second half of 2020 and both virtual editions maintained an average of hundreds of applicants. The program has open conversation environments in Portuguese, French, Spanish, English and German. Ever since its adaptation to the digital world, iFriends has been experimenting with different methods of connection and communication. In this edition, the program is based on conversational meetings through video call software with a maximum of thirty individuals per meeting, meanwhile other activities use emails as their communication tool.

Dall’olio mentions that he has witnessed significant changes in the public of the program’s second virtual edition. With the adaptation to remote activities and the opening to other academic institutions, this edition of USP virtual iFriends has an expressive number of national participants. The program has also helped USP integrate their campuses that are spread throughout the São Paulo state. “Today, iFriends has become a significant platform where mainly undergraduates from all over the country [Brazil] can share knowledge and maintain contact”. The program has been connecting people from north to south of Brazil, a continental-size country, all of that in the middle of a pandemic.

This new perspective of national cooperation has made the institution consider adapting the iFriends model when academic mobility is back. The idea of officialising a hybrid version has been growing stronger, as a result of it being able to help international students with its Buddy System basis, but at the same time make a national welcoming point of academic exchange, enabling national cooperation and knowledge sharing. “USP Virtual iFriends now has the objective to draw USP closer to society as a whole and to other higher education institutions in Brazil as well”.