Culture shock can be a really tricky part to navigate when leaving your own culture. The video we watched in class described culture shock as the way we feel leaving a familiar space or our home to enter a new culture. At first, there’s a honeymoon phase. Everything is different and new, and we’re excited to experience that. However, that soon wears off. Some of the students in the video discussed the role that language plays in culture shock. Oftentimes it can be really overwhelming to travel to a new country without knowing the language well. This creates a feeling of isolation that you really have to fight against. I worked as an international orientation leader on campus in the fall, and I noticed that many of the international students grouped together by country at first. There was an especially big group of Italian students all from the same university who constantly spent time together speaking Italian in a sense of familiarity. I know firsthand from living and traveling in foreign countries myself that it can be extremely frustrating to not be able to communicate fully. When I lived in Rome, I understood spoken Italian pretty well but wasn’t able to verbally respond as quickly. This became especially frustrating in my Italian language class—although I went to an American-model school, the Italian classes were taught by Italian nationals—if a student waits too long to give an answer in Italian schools, the teacher thinks that the student doesn’t know and moves on. For the first month or two I went crazy because I couldn’t translate my thoughts into Italian quickly enough to express myself, but then I was able to think more easily in Italian and it got a bit easier. The video also talked about silence as a form of communication that differs culturally. The professor gave the example of silence as something we’re very uncomfortable with in America, but it’s much more widely accepted in conversations in other countries. I definitely noticed that to be true as an orientation advisor, especially at the beginning. I would walk around with groups of international students or sit with them at meals. The students who were from English-speaking countries were obviously much more comfortable with small talk, but it became extremely uncomfortable for me sometimes when I would try and have a conversation with other students in my group and they wouldn’t say much. They seemed happy to be invited to lunch and enjoying themselves, but they would only answer questions. In response I would talk to fill the silence but then feel really awkward because I felt like I was talking too much. The video also addressed the differences between level of directness in communication, which was something I encountered as well.
The video definitely reinforced many of the things I’ve noticed working with international students here at U of R. The whole concept of orientation often brings about major culture shock. The American university system is pretty much the only one that conducts orientation in this way, and many students were confused as to why they had to be shuttled around to different seminars for several days. Several of them said it was very overwhelming. We also addressed some of the issues that were discussed in the video, such as how to respond when an American student says, “Hi, how are you?” Several of the international students have been my close friends this year, and we’ve discussed some of the differences they’ve had to get used to academically, such as having homework set every day, the importance of class participation, and the level of interaction professors have with students. I was thinking about it and thought that it must be extremely challenging for some exchange students to have to cope with the amount of work assigned here, if you are not used to having regular assignments at your home university and especially if English is not your first language! I also had a bit of culture shock encountering an international friend last year. My friend Nina was from Germany. I had a Jepson class with her and she was the only exchange student, so I went out of my way to be friends with her. We would chat in class or go to lunch occasionally, but it was difficult to establish a friendship with her at first. Then once we became friends Nina felt comfortable being extremely direct and blunt. She was very well-informed on politics, both in the EU and the US. It took me a little while to realize that Nina wasn’t being mean or overly critical, she had just opened up and was expressing herself more directly, in keeping with German culture.
I have experienced culture shock myself. I first moved to Italy when I was eight years old. I was pretty open-minded about it and overall enjoyed the adventure, but very recently after I moved I pitched a fit sobbing on the sidewalk after we’d passed a butcher shop in our little town because I could read in the window that they were selling horse meat. (My actual quote was, “They eat HORSES here?! These people are BARBARIANS!” I was very dramatic.) That was my first encounter with culture shock for sure! When I studied abroad, my culture shock was very delayed. I didn’t have the same culture shock as many of my classmates, because I had lived in Italy before and understood the language fairly well. I didn’t miss my family particularly much at first either. It was about a month in that I became more critical and frustrated. I began interning, teaching in an Italian high school, and there was a level of disorganization there that I was not used to at all. (Side note, in keeping with the video’s discussion of outside view of Americans, many of the students in my classes I taught asked me stereotypical questions about the US like if we all owned guns and if college was like the American Pie movies!) I soon realized that I was going to have to adapt to the situation if I didn’t want to be miserable teaching the whole time. I wasn’t saying that Italian schools were run better or worse than American schools, I was just adapting to the cultural practice. I tried to take this “fight” (as opposed to “flight”) approach whenever I came into a situation that gave me a little bit of culture shock. In fact, I think I experienced more reverse culture shock returning to the US—I was very disillusioned, overwhelmed, and had to readjust.
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