Sophia Huang: Insights Into International Student Experiences
Ella Syverson | November 1, 2023
Germany, Taiwan, New Mexico, Spain, Warren Wilson College (WWC). This is a list of the places that WWC senior Sophia Huang has lived in or called home. Now, she is studying the experiences of other international students in the United States.
Huang is a double major in business and sociology/anthropology and will graduate in May 2024. She was born and raised in the countryside north of Munich, Germany. Her parents are both from Taiwan, so Huang was raised in both languages and cultures.
For two years in high school, she attended a boarding school in New Mexico with a similar focus to WWC: outdoor exploration, community service and a rural setting. It was there that a guidance counselor suggested WWC.
Last year (2022-2023), Huang went abroad as an exchange student at Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain.
This is the story Huang tells others to explain her identity and life experiences in a nutshell — what she calls the “spiel.” She speaks about the confusion people have when she does not fit into the categories they are expecting.
While in Spain, her most common pastime was Salsa and Bachata dancing, where she would be interacting with people briefly when they were partnered, and entirely in Spanish (Huang’s fourth language!) In this setting, she said that people tended to find her to have an “unintelligible identity,” when she tried to answer the question “Where are you from?”
Regardless of this, she found Spain to feel like a neutral place for herself internally, having more cultural similarities to her German and Taiwanese background than to the US. She felt less like an “other,” perhaps in part because of the liminality of the setting and time period for her.
At Wilson, people find Huang’s identity unintelligible in a different way.
“You have a certain persona that you have in mind when you think about an international student,” Huang said. “And I feel like I just fall through the cracks of [this] delineation of categories.”
She speaks English fluently — more fluently than people often assume — and grew up in a Western education system. Regardless of that, she said that people look at her face and think “foreign.”
She also finds that sometimes her conversations with domestic students have been more surface-level, lacking in fluidity or curiosity.
“I think it is noticeable for example that there isn’t as much in depth engagement … when you share that you’re from another country,” Huang said. “So I think, maybe that’s good because they don’t want to ask too many questions just thinking ‘that’s great, you're just another student,’ right? So I think it can also be something positive. But when I came back, and it was like ‘Oh, so where did you go to study abroad?’ And then I would say ‘Spain’ and it was like ‘Oh my god, Spain is so amazing. I’ve been there with my family’ … People very much turn the conversation to them. … whereas I think when you talk with an international student, I just notice, at least from my personal experience, intercultural exchange happens a lot more smoothly.”
Huang makes sure to emphasize that her experience should not be representative of all international students, not just because an individual should never stand in for an entire, diverse group of people, but also because much of her experience is atypical (especially having had previous experience as an international student in the U.S.)
But there are still a host of challenges and pressures that Huang and other international students often experience. Common challenges international students face are language barriers, culture shock, isolation and loneliness, discrimination and racism, and bureaucratic challenges like navigating the U.S. healthcare system and opening a U.S. bank account.
These issues have been a longstanding interest area of Huang’s, and she wrote an ethnography exploring the perspectives of international students at Warren Wilson on creating a sense of home and belonging. In her capstone project, Huang will shift to looking at the roles that international students inhabit in their host institutions.
In her research, Huang will use a mixed methods approach including survey, interview and discourse analysis to study the internationalization of higher education in the United States through the integration of international students. She will be looking at the subculture and agency of international students in negotiating challenges and various roles they hold.
Huang is interested in the gap between the ideal intentions of universities related to global engagement, and the lived experiences of students. International students can feel pressure to perform at a higher level from family or from the institution they attend. They may also feel pressure to represent their country or culture accurately to others and combat stereotypes.
Huang notes that successful internationalization of higher education means more than the number of international students an institution hosts or even the level of interaction/integration between international and domestic students.
She points to other potential indicators of successful engagement, such as the ease with which students are able to integrate, from logistical details like having access to personal supplies to emotional support like meaningful check-ins where students can address their feelings and concerns.
Huang’s research will shed light on all these issues and have significant implications for improving the process of internationalization in higher education, including here at Warren Wilson. It also provides an opportunity for deeper reflection and learning about the complex and intersectional experiences international students face.
As for what is next after her capstone and degree are complete, Huang is not sure yet where her career path will take her, but she is interested in continuing to pursue the operational aspect of internationalization in organizations and institutions.
“Globalization is happening,” Huang said. “And institutions just have the incentive, either intrinsic or external, to internationalize.”