International Student Research Paper

US Students Vs. International Students in Social Life Cathy Small known as her pen name under Rebekah Nathan is a professor and a graduate coordinator of anthropology at Northern Arizona University. During a leave of absence from teaching, during the fall of 2002 at the age of 52 she enrolled as a student at Northern Arizona University, signing up for a standard first year range of courses. She expressed her thoughts and observations by writing a book called My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student. During that time as a student, she saw, observed and felt the social life between US students and international students which became her main target and purpose. Nathan’s argues how international students saw “individualism”

Nathan crafts her observations by interpreting of what international students generally saw in friends and family and what Americans students saw in terms of individualism and independence. In Rebekah Nathan’s book My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, she writes “there's much more independence here. At home students live with their parents. Here families aren't tied together and they call their parents, maybe once a week” (Nathan 73) and the “international students generally saw family as more naturally integrated into their social life when you're not near your family” (Nathan 73). Nathan discovers that in America, the US students tend to only be friends on campus and not interfere or care about their friends’ situations or family matters. Here the friendship doesn't involve families and students don't know where their friends live or who their families

For example, one American student from North Dakota University that Stahl had surveyed or interviewed said “they smell bad, don't speak English and they are annoying” and others said the opposite of how they are very interesting and wonderful people. They add more to college campuses and are well rounded than American students. In other terms some students are saying positive things and some are saying negative things. One student Vikram from University of Chicago says that “ some people like making international students their friends, some don't. Simple”. In familiar terms, some students like to make new friends with different racial backgrounds and some don’t. Their reasons are valid in every way according to them and to some they’re not. It is only an opinion which can be never stamped as a law or a