[010a]

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't understand the language proficiently.

I'd expect you'd see roughly the same numbers if you looked at American students in Chinese universities, or elsewhere. But we have to make this anti-American because its Quartz, and Trump is bad, right?

[jogjayr]

> international students are cliquey.

It might help if you understand why they're cliquey. Many of them are living away from home for the first time, so hanging out with familiar faces and having shared cultural references is comforting (though it sounds wrong). They may not be as proficient in English as they are in their native tongues, so they speak their own languages when they're with each other. And of course to an outsider, a group of people speaking a foreign language seems very forbidding and closed off. Believe me, they (mostly) don't want to be seen that way.

I think pretty much every "group" is cliquey. My own Masters class (about 20-25 people, 50-50 American/foreign) splintered into 2-3 disjoint groups almost immediately after the introductory mixer. I understood and spoke English fine. But not knowing any American pop culture (music, TV shows, sci-fi, games etc. and my own introversion, meant I didn't know then how to deal with people I didn't that have much in common with) meant that I was filtered out of the most likely "group" (students roughly my age). They may all have been speaking English but all the alien (to me) cultural references made it seem forbidding (who's Stephen Colbert? what's Arrested Development? why is it a faux pas to admit liking Coldplay and U2 and Nickelback?). I ended up hanging out with other students from my own country.

> I'd expect you'd see roughly the same numbers if you looked at American students in Chinese universities, or elsewhere

You're right. Most people struggle to flourish socially in foreign cultures; I think this is universally true.

> But we have to make this anti-American

I didn't see the article as anti-American at all. It was more "Isn't it unfortunate how these students are missing out?"

I personally blame myself for my own social isolation during my Masters. I should've tried harder.

[chillacy]

To be fair, at companies when people interview and deny a candidate for "cultural fit", they mean "this candidate doesn't interact and know the same cultural references as my in-group", so this type of exclusion is pretty common.

[kop316]

Out of curiousity, did you meet or make many American friends? To me, I enjoy meeting different people from different cultures. I imagine I am not the only one.

[jogjayr]

Not many. I too enjoy meeting people from different cultures but...it's difficult, for me at least. I mean I find it hard to make friends period, regardless of culture.

[kop316]

I understand that. Going back to your original comment, I think Americans will understand that you don't get those culturual references, and several will not mind showing you and helping you. For me it's actually a lot of fun to show different parts of american cultureand seeing someone else experience it for the first time (Like here: https://xkcd.com/1053/ ). One of the most interesting things that happens if they ask "well why is this part of culture like this", because sometimes I do not even know, so I get to learn a bit about my culture as well.

[jogjayr]

Agreed. And that's the part that I take the blame for. When you're adrift in a culture, you should ask for help. In my (relative) immaturity, I thought asking questions would be considered annoying, rather than being a way to build bridges.

[kop316]

I understand why you could have that mentality though, you can't be blamed for it. I hope sometime you would be able to visit the USA with that knowledge and get a better experience!

[kyle-rb]

>international students are cliquey

I've noticed this at my college firsthand; I see groups or pairs of Chinese students speaking solely Chinese. Speaking in their native language isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly makes them less approachable.

[coraphans]

From my experience, these Chinese students probably did try at first to make friends with local Americans, but were made fun of because of their accents.

So rather than be humiliated, they chose to just hang out with people who won't insult them.

[lazaroclapp]

I do wonder if they were making fun in a mean way or just poking fun in good nature. Of course, the person experiencing it is the one who can better tell, but it is often not obvious when lacking cultural context. One of my closest friends early on laughed at me because whenever I pronounced "vehicle" it sounded to him as "bagel", it did hurt my ego but I quickly got he meant nothing bad by it.

That said, if the American students were really making fun of the accent of Chinese students in a mean way, I can only assume they themselves never tried speaking any kind of Chinese. It is insanely difficult to get to "understandable" in a tonal language if your native language is not tonal, let alone "without funny accent".

[hkmurakami]

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.

[arambhashura]

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).

[afashglaksnhb]

Everywhere I've studied made past exam questions available by default - and doing them as part of revision was absolutely standard. Certainly not cheating!

[jimmies]

I am international myself and have seen international students cheating before. In one (really bad, no one cares) course that I took as an undergrad, everyone cheated. I was the only one who came to class and didn't cheat (or didn't know that you could cheat in that course). It was, perhaps not noble, but not rare for students (American + non-American) to pass on their exams to the next class and professors discuss how to deter that too.

[hkmurakami]

This is exactly why I'm against this behavior -- the only one that are punished are the ethical ones [1]. Kept unchecked, soon you will have pressured all the ethical people into giving into cheating as well!

[1] It's like doping in sports.

[coraphans]

> the Indian and Chinese students had networks of past-year students, who'd built up databases of exam questions.

A friend of mine joined a frat and he said they had the same thing.

[coraphans]

> Honestly, international students are cliquey.

Since we're generalizing here, I'll say the reason for this is, honestly, American students are mean and like to make fun of our accents.

[jonathankoren]

Seems like kind of a leap to declare an article about cultural gaps and "adjustment fatigue" to be "anti-American."

Not everything is political, dude.