Stroll the hallways of the Haas School of Business between classes and you’ll hear a cacophony of languages. More than a third of the business school’s MBA students come from outside the United States.
Berkeley truly is an international university. Hundreds of graduate students from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Canada, India, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Indonesia—the countries with the most graduate students at Berkeley—can be found clustered in business, engineering, computer science, chemistry, mathematics, and economics. Even this list belies the breadth of international students’ presence on campus. Berkeley attracts graduate students from Armenia to Zimbabwe, and their fields of study range from anthropology to urban design.
The United States is the top choice of students who study abroad, and California attracts more foreign students than any other state. Services for International Students and Scholars (SISS), the campus office that provides immigration, financial aid, and other support services for international students, can tell us Berkeley’s numbers. Around 1,400 of the University’s 8,500 graduate students are from outside the United States. They come from more than 100 countries, with the most from Asia (32 percent in 1997) and the fewest from Africa (1 percent).
Berkeley does not recruit overseas for these students, says SISS director Ted Goode. “It’s a compliment to the Berkeley campus,” he says, “not only on its international reputation for research, but that students who completed studies here have gone back home and are now the faculty of the students coming.”
Graduate students who have the good fortune to study alongside international colleagues get nothing less than an international education. International students contribute different viewpoints and ideas to the campus community, says Goode, perspectives that are increasingly valuable in an age in which everything from business to science demands global cooperation.
“On a personal level,” Goode adds, “what I’ve heard from many students is the great opportunity they’ve experienced getting to know people from all over the world.”
What are the challenges and rewards of studying in the United States? What lessons can all of us draw from international students’ experiences? To find out, we talked with faculty and staff who work with international students and with international students themselves.
From China to Haas
Bin Zeng is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in accounting who grew up in Lianyuan, a small town in central China. He first came to the United States with his wife eight years ago to study mathematics and earned a master’s degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. No country, he says, matches the drawing power of the United States for studying science and technology, a sentiment echoed by many international students we interviewed for this story.
But the end of the Cold War and subsequent cutbacks in defense spending have affected science research in China just as in this country. So Zeng decided there were more opportunities in a changing China for a professor of business than for a mathematician.
“Before I came to the United States, you really didn’t need a business degree,” he says. “But now in China we have at last a transition to capitalism. The Chinese government doesn’t want to admit it, and the other side still considers China a communist country, but everything is changing. There are enormous opportunities for business and business faculty.”
What drew Zeng to the Haas School of Business for his Ph.D.? Berkeley’s reputation for openness and tolerance appealed to him. For someone who came of age during the era of Tiananmen Square, the Free Speech Movement is not mere history.
Berkeley held other attractions as well. Zeng paid the campus a visit before accepting the University’s offer of admission. He called his wife back in New Orleans and told her, “It’s like coming back to China.”
The large Asian community here can provide a level of comfort to newly arrived students from the Pacific Rim. “Many of our students have the advantage of being able to locate students from their country and culture,” SISS director Goode says. “That contact and community is important to their being successful here.” In fact, the Bay Area’s large Asian population and California’s close economic ties to Asia are among the reasons the Asian edition of Fortune magazine recently named Haas the best U.S. business school for Asians.
Zeng has indeed found a welcoming community here in the Bay Area. But he didn’t find a large Asian community when he first arrived in New Orleans or know what to expect in this new land. Chinese students arriving today, according to Zeng, are much more knowledgeable about the United States.
“They speak much better English,” he says. “They have access to computers. They can e-mail. When I began my application process in 1989, we had no access to this information. I only knew this is where I wanted to go and there were a lot of opportunities. I couldn’t make a wrong decision.”
Obstacles Overcome
Language can be a formidable obstacle for international students. Studying English back home is one thing. Living and breathing it day after day while trying to figure out a new culture and keeping up with graduate studies can be overwhelming.
When Zeng arrived at Tulane, he easily passed the required Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL. But while he read English well, he spoke and understood it poorly. When he’d studied English in China, a tape recorder cost $100—a full year’s income. Today in China, incomes are up and prices down. But back then, Zeng couldn’t afford the tools to practice his comprehension skills.
At first, he had difficulty understanding even basic greetings. He couldn’t understand anything his professors said. But he could at least read the formulas on the blackboard. And because he found his studies at Tulane less rigorous than in China (not so at Berkeley, he points out), he could devote time to learning skills required for his new life, like writing a check—something he’d never done in China—and mastering English. Zeng’s accent, an intriguing blend of Chinese overlaid with a Louisiana drawl, doesn’t keep him from being in demand by undergraduates as a Graduate Student Instructor.
During his eight years in the United States, Zeng has seen the bad along with the good. While he was at Tulane, New Orleans was dubbed the murder capital of the country. Here, he’s relieved to live in University Village, the family housing complex in Albany where an estimated 40 percent of the residents are international students. In the village, he’s comfortable letting his six-year-old son go outside and play. “If I lived in Chicago or New York, no way I would do that,” he says.
And while Zeng appreciates the U.S. respect for privacy—his professors back home monitored even how he cut his hair—he finds that independence has its price.
“In China,” he says, “when you go to graduate school, you have a house provided by the university. Everything is arranged. Here, you’re on your own. You have to find your own house, you have to set up a telephone. This is trivial to American students, but we don’t have to do this until we come here.”
Still, his advice to international students arriving today is upbeat: life may seem overwhelming now, but it will get better—soon.
“It only takes one minute to learn to write a check,” he says, with characteristic optimism. “After a couple of months, your language is better, and everything is going to be great.”
Three Versions of English
If Zeng, who is from the most widely represented country and in the school with the most international students, represents one end of Berkeley’s spectrum of international students, Suki Mwendwa represents the other end of the spectrum. When Mwendwa came to Berkeley in 1991 from Kenya to earn a Ph.D. in architecture, she was the only student in her class from Africa. She was also the only black student, African or American.
Berkeley had two other Kenyan students when Mwendwa arrived, one undergraduate and one studying for a master’s degree. After her two fellow Kenyans graduated and left, Mwendwa says, “I used to sit on campus and see all these people and feel totally alone.”
Mwendwa may not have found a Kenyan community here, like Zeng found Chinese friends, but as a child in Nairobi, she at least grew up speaking English. Language, then, wasn’t an obstacle. Or was it?
Kenyan English includes sounds and gestures that speak volumes—to Kenyans. But Mwendwa soon learned that her “aaahs” and waving hands drew blank stares from non-Kenyans. So she’d search for a substitute in the crisp British English that Kenyans also learn to speak—only to find out just how many of these words don’t translate into American English.
The people Mwendwa met here would think, “Oh, she speaks English,” and assume she understood more than she did. They didn’t try to explain things to her as they might have with someone for whom English was clearly a second language. Says Mwendwa, “People are not as accepting that I may be on a totally different wavelength.”
Exhausted from translating among three versions of English, Mwendwa sometimes didn’t want to speak at all. She’d retreat from campus to find refuge in her love of dance, seeking out an African dance studio in downtown Oakland. Here she came up against another culture shock: people who looked familiar but were still very different, who were African American.
“There are so many expectations you have to work through—expectations from blacks, expectations from whites,” she says. “Whether I was with black people, white, green, red, blue, I was always translating.”
Life Lessons
The first time Mwendwa left the United States—she’d completed a master’s degree at Cornell in the 1980s—she returned to Kenya angry at the racism she’d encountered in this country. When she returned to the United States, this time to Berkeley, she found a nondenominational church that taught her visualization skills and gave her tools she could use to stay grounded no matter how people treated her.
“It helped me a lot to learn to look at things from a neutral position,” she says, “to learn what is me, and what is you and your expectations.”
Dancing, Mwendwa says, also kept her sane—a lesson for any graduate student whose life revolves only around research. She eventually found a community for herself among her fellow dancers. She moved into an apartment above the dance studio, a restful place with a yard and trees, a place that reminded her of Kenya. “If I don’t find a time-out place, I go crazy,” she says. “I need that and a place to dance.”
When Mwendwa came to Berkeley, she planned to finish her Ph.D. in three years, five tops. Don’t get involved here, she’d told herself. Get the degree and go home.
But once she passed her oral examination and started working on her dissertation topic—the concept of home in Kenya—everything began to come together: the translating she was doing in her head, the balancing act between what blacks and whites expected of her here, even her dancing, which drew from both classical and jazz and defied categorization. She began to see things about Africa she’d taken for granted; she found that by understanding her American experience, she could better explain her Kenyan experience. Studying abroad opened her mind, she says, changed the safe, predictable life she’d lived before.
“I came for the degree,” she said in December, as she prepared to turn in a draft of her dissertation and return to Kenya to finish it. “And I found myself.”
Strangers in a Strange Land
While many international students we interviewed chose Berkeley at least in part for its diversity and reputation for tolerance, not everyone feels entirely welcome here.
Many of these graduate students point with pride to Berkeley’s most famous one-time international student, former Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who came from Taiwan to study in Kentucky in the late 1950s. But they also know this story, recounted in an interview last fall in the local East Bay Express: On his first day of class at the University of Louisville, one of Tien’s professors called him “Chinaman,” a term the young Tien initially thought was an endearment. Two months into the semester, newly made friends informed him otherwise and implored him to make the professor stop.
Tien agonized about what to do. Here he was, a foreign student on a scholarship who worked as a laboratory assistant for this very professor. If he complained, would he lose his funding? Could he be deported? After two sleepless nights, he told the professor, “Please don’t call me Chinaman any more.” The surprised professor never addressed Tien by name after that—but he never called him Chinaman again either.
The challenges foreign students face in 1990s Berkeley are not always as overt as those Tien faced in 1950s Louisville. But there is no denying the pressure that comes from being in a foreign environment. Imagine combining that with the general stress of graduate school.
Joseph Lurie, the executive director of the Berkeley International House, points out that international students may find themselves not only without their usual support systems but unfamiliar with American-style counseling services.
“In most countries,” he says, “to tell your innermost fears and problems to a stranger is not a comfortable thing to do. To tell you I had a problem would be a loss of face. Many of the students come from countries where family expectations are more powerful than in a society like ours, where losing face is a great psychological issue.”
Such feelings of isolation are deepened when foreign students feel unwelcome, which is why places like International House, where students of many nationalities (including American), ethnicities, religions, and cultural backgrounds live together, are so important.
The Big Fear: Jobs
Is there anything behind the unwelcome mat besides plain old xenophobia, the fear or hatred of anything foreign or “strange”? What makes some people fear differences while others embrace them?
International students, after all, are rarely accused of taking limited slots in the classroom, a complaint sometimes voiced by parents of California undergraduates when their son or daughter doesn’t get accepted to Berkeley. On the graduate level, according to SISS’s Goode, there’s more of a sense of open competition, with the best student winning.
Nor is there particular fear that international students will take limited funding away from domestic graduate students. While Graduate Division Dean Joseph Cerny has encouraged departments to take financial responsibility for the students that they admit, including international students, many graduate fellowships are restricted to U.S. students only. Goode estimates that 10 to 15 percent of international graduate students come with funding from their own governments or from U.S. international programs, with another 30 percent individually funded by their families or employers. The rest receive at least some funding from the University, which is one reason why you’ll find them clustered less in the humanities and more in the sciences, where grant money for financial aid is more plentiful.
The root of what animosity there is toward international graduate students, besides just plain fear of difference, seems to be a fear near to the hearts of most graduate students—jobs—as Ph.D.’s of every nationality compete for elusive academic appointments and postdocs.
Global Influence
No one office on campus keeps track of where international students go when they graduate. But while no one knows how many end up staying in the United States, no one who works with international students sees competition for jobs as a problem. Working alongside people from different countries, they say, can only have the same advantages as studying alongside them. And those advantages far outweigh any negatives.
“We don’t have to examine many problems for very long to see that it is extremely important to understand how different countries and societies work,” says Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism. “Despite globalization and homogenization, we’re still very different. And more than ever, we’re interlocked.”
Like the business school, the journalism school is known for its international emphasis. About 14 percent of its students are from outside the United States, hailing from China, Japan, Israel, Brazil, France, Singapore, and Hungary. In addition, journalism students will undertake projects this year that will take them to Hong Kong, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Says Schell, an internationally recognized expert on China and a world traveler himself, “We very much want to bring the world into the school and the school into the world.”
Bringing the world into the school enhances the experiences of all students. Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. students study abroad, according to the Institute of International Education. The presence of international students brings the world to Berkeley.
And the students who return to their countries bring Berkeley to the world, maintaining ties to the United States that are ever more important in a globally interdependent world. They also return to their homes or to other countries with new perspectives they’ve learned here.
As Schell points out, enough bad aspects of American culture get telegraphed around the world: bad television, bad movies, bad fashion. Universities have the opportunity to be vectors of the better aspects of U.S. society.
“In our case,” he says, of the journalism school, “it would be not only notions of a free press but of a press with integrity, a press that’s independent to as large a degree as possible from the imperatives of the marketplace, of government. These are the hallmarks of American journalism, challenged and threatened in many ways, but the principle is clear. It isn’t in many other societies.”
From Berkeley to India
When Schell talks about relaying the better aspects of American society to other countries, he could be talking about a graduate student from India we’ll call Manjul (she asked us not to reveal her real name). Manjul’s first impression of the United States was far from positive, but now she wants to take what she’s learned here back home—if she can.
Academically, Berkeley was everything Manjul had hoped for, but she found her first 18 months here painfully lonely. Naturally reserved, she didn’t try to join any of Berkeley’s many Indian student associations. “I just can’t walk into a room full of people and chat,” she says.
As for Americans, when they passed her in the hall and asked how she was, she couldn’t tell if they really wanted to know—a view shared by a number of international students.
“Their image of an American is a person who smiles and says hello and seemingly is outgoing, then doesn’t do anything else,” says SISS’s Goode. “There’s a perception of superficiality that at times puts international students in a real quandary because they don’t know who’s seeking friendship versus simply being polite.”
Manjul eventually met people and connected with them in that unexpected and serendipitous manner in which friendships sometimes form. She now counts Americans and first-generation Indian-Americans among her closest friends.
She also took deliberate steps to break out of her isolation. “I couldn’t just stuff myself in my room and hope to feel better,” she told us. “I realized there was a very great point to being in the United States: I was free. I could do what I wanted.”
What Manjul wanted was to work with battered women, which she did as a counselor at a volunteer organization. There she found a community of like-minded people and work so rewarding she wants to continue doing it when she returns to India. And herein lies her dilemma.
In India, where women have not made the strides toward equality that they have in this country, few organizations for battered women exist, and women of Manjul’s social background who do such work are ridiculed. Women are expected to marry and then do what their husbands and in-laws want them to do.
“Women barely have space to breathe,” she says. “India still is my home, and I still want to be home because my family is there. Whereas when I came here I wanted to stay five or six years, finish my Ph.D., and go home, now I have mixed feelings about that. I want to be somewhere where I’m allowed to feel strong and free and capable of doing what I want to do.”
Still a few years away from completing her Ph.D., Manjul dreams of opening a shelter for battered women in Calcutta. But she also dreams of a future where the door to the United States is not closed, where she can go back and forth, carrying ideas from one country to the other.
Can You Go Home Again?
Virtually all of the international students interviewed by The Graduate came to the United States planning to return home after they received their degrees. Most still are, others are now uncertain, and all believe they will not fit in as easily as when they left.
Zeng sees opportunities in a changing China and would like to return there, which is a growing trend among Chinese students. While today there are more Berkeley graduate students from China than from any other country, 20 years ago, according to SISS records, there were none. Not surprisingly, the first Chinese students who came to study in the United States tended not to return—it had been too difficult to get permission to leave in the first place. As the political system becomes more open, travel easier, and job opportunities better, Chinese students are starting to go home.
Or at least, if he were single, Zeng would like to go home. His wife feels otherwise. In China, almost every woman works. Here, his wife was denied work due to visa restrictions, which is typical for spouses of international students. But she found she likes being a stay-at-home mom, an opportunity she probably wouldn’t have in China.
So Zeng is keeping his options open. His goal, after all, is to secure a faculty job, and, he points out, when you’re looking for a faculty position, you go where the job is. In the meantime, he worries about his son, who speaks Chinese at home but English at kindergarten and does not read or write Chinese. Chinese schools are very competitive; Zeng fears if he stays here too long, his son may be at a disadvantage should the family return to China.
Research shows that students who are married and intimately a part of a traditional cultural community or who are in a short-term program like a master’s program have the easiest readjustment. But even in these cases, students may change in their work habits and beliefs.
To help international students reacculturate, SISS offers workshops on returning home and brings in specialists from consulates and industries.
“Most students find they have changed more than they expected, and it’s only on reentry that they find how different they are and how others treat them as different,” says Goode.
Mwendwa, for example, never considered staying in the United States, as much as she’d like to return to visit. Yet she admits feeling anxious about returning to Kenya, even though she’s visited her home every two years since she’s been here.
“I’m aware I’ve changed a lot,” she says. “You begin to take in things which become you, unconsciously. It’s taken me a while to accept that I live in two worlds. When I go back to Kenya, there’s an Americanness to me.”
Mwendwa says she’s chosen to see living in two worlds as a blessing, but she admits it is not always easy. She’s aware that she may return only to find that Kenya no longer feels like home. Her new ideas cause a “commotion,” she says. She’ll have to find a way to practice her treasured independence among community-minded fellow Kenyans. And while her old job, teaching design at the University of Nairobi, is still open to her, she fears she may have outgrown it. In other words, like many graduate students completing their studies, she’s at a crossroads, only hers is a cultural crossroads as well as a professional and personal one.
“In a way, I’m really excited,” she says. “In another way, I’m—ooh!” Unable to find words to convey the jumble of excitement and anxiety she feels, she throws up her hands in a gesture that is both Kenyan and universal—a gesture any graduate student, anywhere, would understand.
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