On Oct. 5, I had the privilege of attending the annual NY6 International Student Conference, a gathering of international students from the NY6 liberal arts consortium at Skidmore College. The program started with a well-delivered opening speech by Skidmore’s Sands Family Foundation Director of Diversity and Career Development, Mr. Soha Jafarzade, better known as Mr. Soha. Soha, who was once an international student, used the platform to urge Internationals to appreciate the efforts and sacrifices we have made to get this far and use that to inspire ourselves throughout college and even life. This particular highlight pushed me into a reflective mood during the rest of the speech: I kept on thinking about myself and exactly what sort of things I had given up to pursue an American education.
International Students do face huge trade-offs: some of us give up security of the familiar to embark on this journey. Applying to Hamilton was personally one of the most frightening life decisions I have had to make. When I submitted my application to the college in the EDII admission round, I understood I was signing up for a four-year journey I knew little to nothing about; one risk I was not willing to take but for encouragement from people who had had the Hamilton experience and whom I trusted. So, for the most part, you could say my coming to Hamilton was a gamble. Now, do not get me wrong, this should not imply I had any experiences with a college — in Ghana, South Africa or even in the United States — that I had complete knowledge about. In fact, I was just as uninformed about other colleges on my list as I was about Hamilton. At this point, you are probably wondering, “Why this information?” I share this to show that even as a freshman without an ounce of the experience most Hamiltonians possess, I felt and still feel the weight of my decisions from time to time. I am sure most of my fellow international students feel the same way I do.
As an international student in high school in South Africa and now as an international student at Hamilton, people, even close friends at home, have often asked me, “Chris, are you returning to Ghana after graduation?” Although there is nothing wrong with the question, my interpretation varies. When it comes from Americans, I know I am about half of the time expected — with some level of contempt — to say that I will be staying. On one occasion, one American fellow I had just met asked me to tell him sincerely if I was going to go back home after the summer program ended. According to him, his parents had once told him that people from “Africa” always stayed for citizenship when they came to the United States and so he was curious to know if I had similar intentions. In a similar incident, on my ride to catch my flight home, my Nigerian Uber driver, after learning that I was returning to Ghana after just two weeks of stay in the United States, immediately launched a campaign to convince me to stay. Besides the fact that these encounters were highly ignorant in many ways, I found myself shocked to the core. Did they just assume that I did not have a life before coming to the U.S? Did they think I would abandon my high school education just to stay in the U.S? Or that I did not have any family and loved ones to care about? As an international student from a developing country, the public’s general perception is that there is nothing really good about our home countries since the US (or whichever country we reside) is presumably better.
When it comes to studying abroad in a country like the US, I would not deny there is a certain hysteria associated with the experience. People associate the study abroad experience here with automatic success. In my opinion, this perception is the single biggest reason why most developing countries lose human resources through brain drain.
The societal pressures, by both receiving countries and our homelands, coerce international students to put ourselves above and beyond the reach of our society’s problems. Yet it is these societies that urge us to distance ourselves as much as we can from the realities of our homelands. Personally, I do not carry the same view. To the surprise of my friends, I always went home during my high school breaks. It is only up to us (and I mean international students) to remind ourselves in the face of all the coercion that we are here to get an education.
We may have given up a lot to get here, but that does not mean we intend to give up everything and everyone we love back home. Indeed it is true that an American education and an American life is of high quality, but all of us as educated individuals have a responsibility to harness every opportunity to help develop our own countries. In the words of former South African president Thabo Mbeki, “When will the day come that our dignity will be fully restored, when the purpose of our lives will no longer be merely to survive until the sun rises tomorrow!”
