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Photo by Irene Fertik UCLA
Today
Gohar Grigorian of the UCLA International Visitors Bureau
greets a member of a visiting European delegation on a State
Department-sponsored tour of the United States. At right is
her student assistant Samantha Popoy.
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welcoming 800 international guests annually
Visitors bureau rolls out red carpet
BY ANNE BURKE
UCLA Today Staff
Gohar Grigorian stands at the ready as a charter bus
rolls to a stop at UCLA’s Westholme entrance. She is straight-backed,
dark-suited and nicely coiffed, with a cell phone clipped to her
waist and a stack of documents in the crook of her arm.
The bus is carrying a delegation of 11 Europeans who are meeting
with UCLA administrators and academics as part of a U.S. State Department-sponsored
visit to America. The passengers alight, among them a police officer
from Norway, a German politician and a journalist from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Grigorian welcomes each with a wide, warm smile and a “Hello,
I’m Gohar, so nice to meet you.”
Grigorian knows better than most that you don’t get a second
chance to make a first impression. For the past decade, she has
worked for UCLA’s International Visitors Bureau, which each
year brings more than 800 international guests to campus, eager
to forge bonds with professional counterparts and to learn about
America from the vantage point of one of its most storied academic
institutions.
Recent visitors have spanned the globe, ranging from Afghan judges
learning about U.S. jurisprudence and Tunisian opposition politicians
studying grassroots democracy to Italian Ambassador Sergio Vento,
who took in the Young Research Library’s collection of works
by the Italian Renaissance book printer Aldus Manuzio.
“If they’re in Los Angeles, they usually want to come
to UCLA,” said Grigorian, the program officer for the visitors
bureau since 2002. The bureau traces its history to 1966, when it
was part of the now-disbanded UCLA Visitors Center. The bureau later
moved to Special Events and Protocol and in 2001 became part of
the International Institute.
As UCLA’s unofficial hostess, Grigorian makes sure that
visitors get face time with a faculty member or administrator in
their area of specialization. The European delegation, for example,
was interested in diversity, so Grigorian arranged a meeting with
a leading campus expert on that subject, Assistant Vice Chancellor
Thomas E. Lifka. From a small office on the 11th floor of Bunche
Hall, she works the phones, arranging the tiniest details, down
to side dishes on the lunch menu. Her only staff is a part-time
student assistant.
“Gohar does an excellent job,” said Napah Phyakul
Quach, director of exchange programs for the International Visitors
Council of Los Angeles, with which Grigorian works closely.
The protocol business is laden with land mines, but Grigorian
has so far managed to sidestep them. She keeps a book on multicultural
manners nearby and is a keen reader of body language who can “tell
if someone is going to shake my hand or not.” For Muslim visitors
who are so inclined, she sets aside prayer time. When picking a
menu, she usually bypasses meat and poultry in favor of salmon.
Snafus are inevitable, though. When a professor couldn’t
meet with a delegation at the last minute, she frantically knocked
on faculty doors until she found someone who agreed to substitute.
“The visitors didn’t even notice what happened,”
she said.
But Grigorian’s hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed. In
February, UCLA’s work promoting citizen diplomacy won the
bureau a commendation from the State Department, which each year
brings thousands of international visitors to the United States
for professional exchanges and study.
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