Submitted by Admin
“Your college years are going to be some of the best of your life!”—How many times have you heard that? If you were anything like me, you were psyched up to go to college years before you had to. But by some cruel twist of fate, we seem to have our college years overlapping with a global pandemic. No matter where we want to go, there seems to be some level of quarantine, lockdown or social isolation present. Not exactly the partying and socializing scene that we’d imagined.
But that’s what happens in life sometimes. You wake up one day and realize there’s a deadly virus on the loose that’s shutting down the entire world. But it’s been a year or so since the pandemic started, and at this point, we really can’t keep our lives on pause anymore. We simply have too little assurance of when it will be completely safe again to do so. So we must persevere with the state of things as they are, and try to make the best of them. And by that I mean we have to let go of our rose-tinted college dreams and face reality: zoom screens and online classes, and a vastly reduced campus life.
Granted, many states and universities are now opening up and allowing students to resume college in person. And for those students, moving to college will mean literally moving out, to college. For some others, however, it may still mean online classes only. It seems that those who are disproportionately affected by this are international students.
Woes of an International Student
International students inherently have it a little tougher; they have to fly to a far-off unfamiliar country for their education, often alone, and try to acclimate to this foreign culture and make friends from scratch. But the pandemic only worsened the situation for them.
At the beginning of 2020 when the pandemic was just starting to affect America, many international students had to make the difficult decision of choosing to stay in a foreign country and see how things played out, or fly back home quickly to be with their families. Either option posed its own risks. Those who stayed found themselves stuck for months on end without proper contact with their families and often isolated from their friends and peers who moved back home to their families. Those who chose to go home found that they could not return, and were at the mercy of the prevailing border controls that could change at any time. If their university chose to go back to in-person teaching and they could not make it back in time, then who knows what would happen to their course of study.
What this situation did was shed light on matters of social inequality and inclusion for international students in institutions of higher education. While every stratum of students faced uncertainties, international students were arguably the most affected. If they had online school, those students who went back to their home countries had to contend with vastly different time zones, firewalls in their home country which prevented the use of certain websites or software, faulty or low-speed internet connections, among many other problems. They may also have been faced with unsympathetic administrators, college or immigration policies that further disadvantaged them.
Furthermore, they might also have been unable to take part in many bonding activities like clubs or college events as and when they were allowed again. This could lead to international students feeling even more excluded and isolated than many of their native peers. There is little that can be done, unfortunately.
Reaching Out
If you have an international friend who hasn’t been able to make it back to college, try to reach out to them and initiate conversations. It will mean a lot to them that you still remember them and want to spend time with them even if you haven’t seen them for a year. Take some time out of your weekend to have a call with them, and perhaps other mutual friends, to chat about what’s going on in their life, or to watch a movie together.
It’ll do them good to speak to their friends to simply unwind and catch up, or even to talk about their worries in a safe space. Video calls will be especially helpful, provided everyone involved is comfortable with it, as there really is no replacement to in-person conversations and video calls are the closest you can get to hanging out together across borders. And most importantly, be open with them. Don’t hide the things that are happening in your life just because you think it might make them sad or angry. Confirm with them first if they want to hear about it, and if not, then talk about something else. But if you try to hide it, your friend might mistake that for you distancing yourself from them which can add to their feelings of isolation.
It’s not easy navigating this strange landscape, especially when you were expecting something so vastly different. But with all of us making efforts to reach out, and by providing a helping hand, or a check-in with our friends and peers, we can pull through this, together.