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40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

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Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#121

Post by VLM »

Spooky23 wrote: post #104
beeftime wrote: post #31

Before I got into software development I worked for a South Korean company that helped high-level students get into American and Canadian universities. The single biggest source of stress for myself and the other westerners working there is that the administration's (and the parents'!) only goal was to get these kids into a school, and absolutely no thought was given to acclimating them to a different culture or teac…

It's more than that -- parents explicitly don't want their children to absorb American culture.

Interestingly as a parent I think that's fairly common, certainly more than majority, both foreign and domestic.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#122

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

I moved to the US when I was 12 and my middle school principal tried finding someone who spoke my language that I could shadow. She couldn't. Little did I know then, but I think that it might have been the thing that had the biggest outcome in my success in the US.

There were other kids who joined the school from other countries right around the same time as me (we all did ESL together), but they all spoke languages that were highly represented in the school. Over the years, it was incredibly noticeable to me how insular they ended up -- hanging out mostly with expat friends, speaking their native language on breaks, etc.

Meanwhile, I had to try and make American friends any way possible -- which for me was through our school's robotics club (and since I am typing this here, you can guess that the rest is history)

I completely understand the way immigrants rightfully treasure and celebrate their heritage. But I have always found it puzzling -- especially in college -- to see people from overseas mostly hanging out with their own.

I have heard far too many times how "cold" Americans are, how they aren't friendly to foreigners, etc. At least in my experience, that could not be further from the truth. What I HAVE observed is foreigners like myself failing to leave the safety of their known communities and fulling embracing the experience they supposedly came here for.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#123

Post by Crisco »

BlackjackCF wrote: post #106
habosa wrote: post #74

It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…

It's a bit of a catch-22 because you need a high level of interaction with native speakers to be able to get to Level 4/5, but it's intimidating and difficult to do so. Most of the international students I've interacted that pushed through this were really, really social to begin with.

I'm not a social person by nature, but when I decided I wanted to learn Spansh, I had to go out of my way to talk to Spanish with people I didn't know. It was scary, embarrassing, and at times depressing, but my desire to learn the language overcame my fear of social embarrassment. I'm now trying to do the same thing with Portuguese.

There are ways to force interaction, but if the student doesn't understand how to learn or doesn't have the desire, then they'll never be able to comfortably speak with people. They don't have to be really social (it certainly helps), they just have to want it enough.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#124

Post by saint_fiasco »

rpearl wrote: post #72
anonyguy1969 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The political correctness statement is so spot on. I still struggle with that till now. People just don't want to talk about certain issues here it seems; a stark contrast to europeans

Give an example.

Money. Asking an American how much they earn or how much they paid for something can be perceived as rude.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#125

Post by arambhashura »

hkmurakami wrote: post #94
010a wrote: post #89

I can't generalize for every school, or everyone at every school. I attended an engineering program at one of the top 5 schools by total international student population. Honestly, international students are cliquey. Many of them that I talk to openly admit to cheating on their english proficiency exams universities require you to take before you can attend. Meshing with local students is nearly impossible if you don…

I'm sort of okay with the cheating on English proficiency exams. They're pretty contrived anyways. But these groups also tend to help each other out in cheating on actual assignments and tests, which doesn't sit well with the me.

Going off-topic from the OP: Not only that, but when I was a foreign student, the Indian and Chinese students had networks of past-year students, who'd built up databases of exam questions. While perhaps strictly not cheating, this gave them an advantage, because some professors repeated questions from previous quarters/years. Some of us thought that was unfair, and talked with the professors and they were unwilling to ensure that questions were not repeated. So we asked the professors to give us exam questions from the last few years, and made them available to everyone in the library. Hopefully this at least leveled the playing field a tiny bit, but I'm not sure it mattered in the grand scheme of things. (Disclosure: I'm Indian too).

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#126

Post by M_Grey »

VLM wrote: post #119
M_Grey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's a totally different statement, with utterly different implications. To be honest, I'm impressed that 60% do have American friends... that's a pretty solid majority.

The data is highly distorted by a large fraction of foreign students being Canadians. "Hey guys lets watch hockey tonight" and a fondness for maple syrup in the cafeteria isn't a major cultural road bump, compared to say a dude fresh out of Saudi Arabia who barely speaks English. Also the study carefully avoids discussing the stats for the Americans so there's no useful comparison (intentionally?). Is that the same r…

>I also took some specialty classes at a tech college and their students have nothing at all to do with each other socially as near as I can tell. A nineteen year old kid living in moms basement, a 40 year old retired disabled army vet living in a house, and a 30 year old single mom working three jobs and living in an apartment walk into a bar together sounds like the start of a joke but it was pretty accurate description of tech school. Socializing with classmates seems to be a purely 18-22 residential/dorm/greek thing. And thats still a lot of kids... but gotta be realistic, its maybe only 3/4 of total students, maybe even less.

Sooooo true. It's become, for all intents and purposes, a series of parallel universes that just happen to occupy the same space.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#127

Post by booh »

You can become extremely proficient in the language and be highly sensitive to the culture. You can also spend 10 years in the country to the point were you grasp practically everything, no matter how much randomness is involved in the conversation or the place and time it takes place.

It does not matter. Majority of foreigners, westerners or not, won't have real local friends in English speaking countries.

Even though you do acclimatize to the culture and language you might still not be fond of it. I lived in countries were it would have been easier than in others to interact with people, but in the end I wasn't able to because I either wasn't a fond drinker (commonplace in all english speaking countries) or I didn't enjoy being involved in mundane silly-office conversations during the smoke break.

Most of the fresh expats can't even realize what they are getting into when they move into another country. If you are deciding to do so and you come across this post, do it, go and check it out, but beware that your inner you will never completely mold to that place.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#128

Post by tn13 »

My wife studied at an American college. She had no friends. The college had over 100 students 100% of them from India, Middle East and Turkey. The college was nothing but a way for H4 women to get F1 so that they could eventually get OPT and instead of being deadweight at home they could stand on their own legs. This is probably one of the N colleges out there.

There aren't too many American citizens in these colleges and I will not be surprised if these student constitute 50% of total F1s.

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#129

Post by tcbawo »

carussell wrote: post #108
tcbawo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, I've found that people will not invest as much in a friendship given an upfront, known shelf life (duration of grad school, year abroad, etc.) unless they are bound by a similar constraint. How often does chatting with someone on a plane lead to a life-long friendship?

This is true for a lot more than friendships. It's less rational than I think you try to give it credit for in your last sentence. How long were you at your last job? Let's say you spent 3 years and 2 months there. Let's make an assumption and say that your time there was a positive one for your colleagues, and that you left with no animosity and—specifically—no animosity about the timing or circumstances of your dep…

This definitely seems true. Although, it seems that a shared experience of a known duration can create a stronger bond. Lots of people make strong friendships during specific time-bound periods (high school, college, military tour).

Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus

#130

Post by arambhashura »

1024core wrote: post #102

When I came to the US, I made an effort to reach out to Americans (in the dorms, in class, etc). I found that, after you remove the veneer of programmed culture and biases, under it we're basically all the same: similar goals, fears, aspirations, etc. I formed some very close friendships with Americans, and I'm still close friends with them 20+ years later. My point is: as a newbie in this country, I had to make the…

Not everyone is up to making that effort (I agree that they _should_).

For me personally, I could easily have ended up in the 40%. I was not very social, and would have had problems making friends with anyone. As an Indian, I'd probably have welcomed Indian friends, just because I'd have felt less ill-at-ease with them. Luckily, my English was good, I loved playing sports, and some American students made an effort to make friends. That made all the difference. I really appreciate those classmates who made an effort to know a strange-looking, strange-talking kid. They made a massive positive difference in my life.

Also, I did some free tutoring. I probably wouldn't know anyone outside of Engineering, had I not done that.

Another large difference nowadays, I suspect, is that a critical mass of students of certain cultures has been reached. So it's perhaps difficult to break out of a default behaviour of hanging out with "your own kind". When a foreign student arrives in the US, the local students association welcomes them and helps set them up. Right there are laid the potential foundations of remaining in the comfort zone of fellow countrymen.

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