“I have to constantly learn how to keep good relationships with people.”

 

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Transcript for American People Take It for Granted

At first, I didn’t really understand everything.  Well because, everything’s new.  There are some certain ways that people do things.  Like, if you want to make an appointment with your professor, they would prefer if you could send email to them.  You know, there are certain ways to format your emails.  Well, American people just take it for granted because it’s a thing — those are the things that they have been doing forever, you know?  But for international students, it’s just a cultural differences.  Like, I have to constantly learn how to, you know, like keep good relationships with people.  Yeah, it’s different.  It’s really different.

My personal opinion is, I heard a lot of international students talking about their struggles, you know, with their relationships with American people.  They feel sometimes — I heard some comments like, ‘American people are really indifferent.  They are not that welcoming.’  Things like that.  I think it’s just — for me, I think, it’s just a different type of culture.  You just have to realize that.  They are not being indifferent, they are not being cold.  It’s just that the way, how they react.  So for international students, I want to tell them like, just to look at things really positively from a bright side instead of keep complaining about all the things, you know.  Like, ‘Those people are different from me, and they just don’t like me.’  Try to get rid of those concepts and ideas in your mind.  Because it’s not uncommon to hear some international students to constantly say, ‘Hey, I hate group work in my class.’  Or it’s not uncommon either to hear American students say, ‘Whenever we do group work, international students are lazy and they don’t want to participate in any of the group work.  And they let me do all the work.’  When I was a student at VU [Valparaiso University], I constantly heard, you know, those comments.  American students most of the time, they say they don’t want to ask some questions when they are doing group work in class.  Because they feel like if international students want to express their opinions, they are just to go ahead and say that.  And international students most of the times, they would like to wait until other people approach them first.  Well, especially Chinese culture, like you don’t just blurt out everything.  Like people want to make exactly one hundred percent sure that what they want to say is right.