Pat Burak stands alone outside Goldstein Auditorium, hints of dark circles under her eyes. Everyone else — the 100-plus students required to go to the international student orientation — is inside listening to a presentation about going to school in the United States for the first time.

“I’m tired,” Burak said, taking a deep breath. “I got a call last night at two in the morning from a student in China.”

The student, she explains, forgot an important immigration form in Syracuse when going home for summer break. Without it, immigration officers in China wouldn’t let her board her flight. So the student called Burak in tears, asking her to fix it, to untangle the oftentimes complicated web of immigration policy and bureaucracy that comes with being an international student.

“I was on the phone until five in the morning trying to help her,” Burak said.

And she did. The student was eventually able to get on a plane and come to Syracuse University to start the new year.

Burak, the director of the Slutzker Center for International Services, the primary hub of resources for international students at SU, deals with these types of  crises from international students on a daily basis. When a student has an immigration issue, Burak knows what to do. When a student is in the hospital, she drops everything to visit them. When a student needs help moving in or out, Burak drives up and helps them pack or unpack herself.

“What if it were my own kid?” Burak said. “I would want someone to care.”

While individual student crisis management is a major part of Burak’s job, she also uses her clout as Slutzker Center director to bring international students to the attention of institutional forces at SU.

Internationalization, the idea that campus should increase and support both international students on campus and domestic students abroad, is a key pillar in Chancellor Kent Syverud’s Academic Strategic Plan, something Burak was a part of creating. From her recommendation in the strategic plan, a council on internationalization with Burak on it was formed.

Burak is doing this job as the number of international students on campus is increasing. Total international student enrollment has more than doubled in the last ten years, according to Slutzker Center data. And just this year alone, there are 4,244 international students enrolled at SU — that’s 20 percent of the total SU population.

As international student orientation was starting to finish, Burak, still standing outside Goldstein Auditorium, spotted a student walking toward the auditorium doors.

“Are you supposed to be in there?” Burak asked, pointing to the auditorium.

“I just have a question,” the student responded.

He told Burak he’s living in an South Campus apartment, but he’s having trouble with his roommate. He knows someone living in a dorm on main campus whose roommate disenrolled. Could he live with his friend on main campus?

“I need the name of your friend and the student who’s no longer living there,” she said.

He gave them to her and she scribbled the names down in a notebook.

“I’ll look into it,” Burak told him.

By the end of international student orientation that afternoon, Burak walked away with at least two other names written in her notebook.

“I always carry something around with me so I can write those things down,” she said.

And even though she’s the one in charge of it all — international student orientation, the Slutzker Center — Burak still has notebooks with names of students who once asked her for help.

“If a student comes in and they are in the middle of some kind of crisis, whether it’s academic or emotional or something just happened in their lives, Pat is always willing to talk to them,” said Max Wojnowski, a front desk advisor at the Slutzker Center. “She’s always willing to go to bat for them to the extent that she can.”

Last fall, Oleksiy Anokhin, a Ph.D. student from Ukraine, needed to go to the doctor. But, like most international students, he didn’t have any experience navigating the U.S. healthcare system. He had no idea what to do and where he could go without spending a fortune. But he felt he could talk to Burak because the Slutzker Center, he said, is his second home on campus.

“It’s difficult to get good advice from students here about that, but she (Burak) gave me amazing advice,” Anokhin said. “She’s an amazing leader, a real leader. She’s one of the most inspirational people at this university for me.”

On a Thursday night last week, Burak heard a cough in a Huntington Beard-Crouse classroom.

“Here,” Burak said, handing an unopened pack of Halls cough drops to the student who coughed. She saw them at CVS and bought them in case someone needed them.

Standing in front of her students, Burak steps into a world where magical realism and prose collide. She teaches a small honors class, The Power of Evil in Russian Literature, which she calls her escape from the world. Still, her motherly nature shines through during class as well — rewarding, scolding and being constantly aware of everything her students are doing.

Fiona Lenz | Staff Photographer

Empathy lives in both of Burak’s worlds, the one where she’s leads the Slutzker Center and the one where she teaches Russian literature.

“Teaching literature is talking about life, so you need to know what students value in life,” Burak said.

And it’s her willingness to pay attention to the small stuff — like buying cough drops because she thinks someone may need them — is what draws students in.

“She feels so passionately about everything she’s teaching and it really comes across,” said Cole Greabell, a senior psychology and forensic science double major and a student in Burak’s class. “The way that she engages with us makes it a lot more than a regular lecture.”

The relationships she builds with students go beyond books. Last fall, when a student repeatedly didn’t show up for class because of her mental health, Burak drove to the student’s apartment and drove her to the Counseling Center herself.

The lecture continues after the student takes the cough drop. Then Burak asks her to read a passage from “The Master and Margarita,” a classic piece of Russian literature by Mikhail Bulgakov.

“What do you think is happening in this passage?” Burak asked the class.

“I think it means he’s really hungover,” a student responds.

“You know for Russians, that really isn’t that surprising,” Burak quips back.

The class laughs.

Toward the end of class, Burak asks the room to think about a sentence in “The Master and Margarita.”

Septa felt the light in the bedroom, already weak enough to begin to fade.

“Okay, what do you think the light symbolizes?” Burak asks.

“The light symbolizes life?” a student slowly responds, unsure of the answer.

“Yes, yes. That’s exactly right,” Burak said, smiling and nodding her head. “Yes, yes.”

Her small expression of encouragement bring visible confidence to the student, but just as quickly she turns the page, and the class marches on.

Published on November 17, 2016 at 1:09 am

Contact Rachel: rsandler@syr.edu