I came to UT from Colombia a year ago, and, though I had been to the U.S. as a tourist, adjusting to life here was a whole different experience.
This year, the University of Tampa will open its doors to hundreds of freshmen—including international students from more than 100 countries, who will have to face stronger changes than their American schoolmates.
For most students, it’s the first time that they leave home; however it is not the same as when you come from outside the U.S.
All the challenges that international freshmen have to go through can be summarized by the word “integration.”
Being in a different country implies going through this assimilation process in order to be seen not as foreign but as a common student.
Divisions between American and international students are very visible during freshmen year.
For American freshmen, college comes along with something they refer to as the “college experience.”
It is not unusual to meet students who do not know which major they will pursue, but rather claim to be at the University to live that college experience.
This includes, of course, partying hard, drinking a lot and maybe even experimenting with other kind of stuff.
It is not that international students do not go to parties, drink or enjoy those kinds of things. Most of us just have a different ways of defining the college experience, different ways of handling it.
In general, we do not drink with the purpose of getting drunk or blacking out, like some of American freshmen who seem to think that to be wasted at a party is something to be proud of or something you can tell to everybody.
At the beginning of the semester, there is a lot of narrow-mindedness among freshmen.
Most American freshmen think they know perfectly how things are like in other countries, so they accord clichés and stereotypes to international students.
But international freshmen also have a lot of misconceptions about how life is like in America, and may classify American students under a pattern that is most of the time far from the truth.
This situation creates certain communities: freshmen tend to stay with people with whom they can keep their identities and somehow feel “accepted” and just like all the others in the group.
Those communities are generally limited to a certain ethnicity or country of origin. This phenomenon interferes in the process of the integration of international freshmen, whom at the beginning can be afraid of mixing among other groups.
What has been hardest for me, and most of my international friends, is getting used to the food. Just as there is the “freshmen fifteen,” there should be another one called the International Freshmen Fifteen as we really lose weight because of the food!
Food on campus is not what most of the students are used to, more so International ones, and it is really a hard change from our type of food.
It will definitely take some time for international freshmen to get used to their new lives in the States.
However, most of the time this is a successful process and we really get to love Tampa and to feel at home.
That does not mean that there is a complete integration, as communitarianism remains very strong, and it is very rare to see international and American students hanging out together.