With the development of globalization, higher education plays an increasingly important role in a country’s development. So more and more students, in order to get the better education choose to study abroad. Many people envy the students who can study in foreign country to get the advanced education. However, it is difficult to imagine the pressure of international students when they are studying abroad. Students’ pressure comes from different aspects, but three of the most important pressures including emotion, culture and study.
It means international students will face emotional loneliness, culture shock and the burdensome learning task. First, one of the reasons that students’ pressure appear is emotional loneliness. Before students’ departure, they usually feel very excited. Because they are full of curiosity about the life in a foreign country, and they have expectations to live alone. But when they really depart, there is a tremendous contrast from excitement and expectation to loss. A Chinese author has written a book about his student life in Canada.
He described his feeling in that time: completely perplexed. When he arrived, he found a lot of things were not as he thought. In an unfamiliar environment, he must solve the problems alone. Because of the language barrier, he was afraid and confused. (Wang and Liu) A psychologist pointed out that many immigrants have mental problems, and international students’ reflection is more obvious. (Zhao) Because they are usually only one person living outside, they lack communication with their families so they will feel homesick. Students’ emotional loneliness will cause many problems.
For example, a student from Changsha studied in Australia. When she arrived there, she couldn’t integrate into the community and had no contact with other people. Because she did not keep in touch with the outside world, eventually she had mental illness. (Yu) Therefore, not every student is able to withstand the torment of loneliness. The second problem most international students experience is culture shock. As people all know, different countries have different cultures. There are many difficulties in adapting to a new culture.
When students first arrive in a foreign country where is speaking a different language, the first problem they met is probably the language. In most case, students can’t communicate as well as natives due to their poor English ability. Even though some students have high mark in IELTS, they find that it is hard to communicate with others face to face because there are different accents for different people. (Petasis) Moreover, different cultures may lead to misunderstandings. For instance, in North America, students’ essay must give references; otherwise, it will be seen as plagiarism.
But some countries do not emphasize this part, so students may not pay attention to the references and get zero. On the other hand, international students are treating as Martians by local students. (Petasis) Because international students are different from them, such as language, dress, behavior or customs, they may dislike international students. So sometime they would ask some questions in order to insult international students. This culture shock will make students full of surprise, confusion or disorientation and so on, thus causing heavy pressure for them.
In addition, as a student, the most stressful thing certainly is study. At first, international students must study in the second language; it will be more difficult than in their own language. Frank Miao, the Dean of FELC said: “Because of language limitations, it is not easy for students to fully understand what the professors say. A large number of international students in Canada can not pass the language test, so most of them must spend a long time in ESL. ” (Miao) At the same time, even if they can access the professional courses, they can’t adapt to the new teaching system.
A Korean student shared his experience: “in my country, students can be pass just do the final project well, but in UK, professors put more emphasis on the process of the project. ” So he needed more time to adapt this change. (Sovic) As international students have many issues with their study, they usually do not have a good mark at the beginning. So many students fail a few courses is a common thing. However, when they find that they can not catch up with other students, they were under a lot of pressure.
Even worse is, some international students can not burden their heavy load of study, so they choose end their lives. Nicholson) Obviously, there is a great impact on students by the burdensome learning task. All in all, it is not easy for international students because they face many problems when they study abroad. With their emotion, they feel loneliness will cause mental illness. Furthermore, they will go through the issue is culture shock. Of course, the heavy load of study makes students feel upset. All of these are tough to withstand. For this reason, counseling for international students to help them relieve stress is particularly important.