Life as an International Student

Being an international student in South Korea has been a great experience for me for many reasons, but I think the most important factor that has resulted in my enjoyable experience is that Korean students love to meet and talk with American students. The fact that most of us look completely different from them and also their desire to speak with us to practice their English made it very easy for us to meet people and caused the students at SNU to be very welcoming and friendly to us. 

Unfortunately, when I take a step back to compare my experience with what I see going on back at the University of Michigan, I realize that my experience as an international student in Korea seems to be a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable than what I believe is the experience for most of the international students at U of M. In Ann Arbor, most people don't tend to go out of their way to speak with international students, which seems to make it much more difficult for those students to fit in and feel a part of the campus. I think this has a lot to do with the fact the we come from such a multicultural society, so that when we see international students, we don't immediately know that they are international students and therefore don't treat them any differently than we would any other student on campus, which typically means we don't go out of our way to speak with them and make them feel welcome. This causes many of the international students to feel isolated, so they end up only hanging out with other international students. This further reduces the likelihood of American students approaching them to talk to them, because many people feel intimidated about approaching a group of students to make friends, especially if that group is speaking in another language or seems to have something in common that you don't have with them. One last thing that contributes to the difficulties many international students experience at U of M compared with my experience in Korea, is that many international students come from cultures where it is almost unheard of to approach strangers and strike up a conversation, whereas we, as Americans, do this almost every day. So when we go abroad, we don't feel as uncomfortable approaching strangers and trying to make friends, whereas the international students at U of M just aren't comfortable doing that since that was not the way they were brought up.