Right before coming to Cambridge, I wondered if I needed to attend some kind of orientation for new international students. I in fact emailed the university international students’ office to ask about this, and the answer was no, as such events did not receive particularly positive feedback from students in the past years. I was slightly disappointed. Having been through student orientations in undergrad over a few years, first as a participant and later a peer leader, I’ve got the concept of international students having a different status ingrained in my mind. They are more foreign, more diverse, and in a way, more vulnerable.
They do have orientation sessions for the general student body here, which they call the “Freshers’ Week.” (Here’s another linguistic difference that may be worth nothing, between the British “fresher” and the American “freshman.” Somehow the former sounds funnier, or “fresher.”) It is not that different from what I went through in my first two weeks of undergrad. Basically you are thrown into a series of social events and logistic procedures that help you settle into the community. You go to welcome parties, tours around the city, activities fairs, and what’s particular to this place, the formal matriculation dinner (where everyone’s dressed in gowns, assigned seats and served a fancy four-course meal — more could be said about formals).
But I was still surprised by what I encountered. A large part of it is the range of diversity in the postgraduate student body. After meeting a random group of people on the first day of arrival, I realized almost everyone I had talked to came from a different country, except the few, maybe under five, from the UK. There are obviously a number of EU citizens, those from the northern and eastern countries slightly more than the southern ones I found, but there isn’t a lack of people from other continents, and some “mixed” like Japanese British or British Italians.
This reminds me of how much of the first conversations I had at the beginning of my college career was about cross-cultural transitions or the identity of a third culture kid. I haven’t attended one formally organized talk on such subjects at Cambridge. One of the few things I remember from my undergrad orientation sessions is that the international students of my class represented people from nearly fifty countries. But no statistics like this are brought up here, neither by the institution nor by the students.
A lot of time I am not sure if the change of my experience has to do with my being a postgrad now or being in a different country, or the change that has taken place in myself. Most likely all of them. I’ve been enough of a foreigner that my foreignness has learned to settle into the local more quickly. But on the other hand, I do not feel as foreign being here, at least up to now, as I did in the US (and not to mention in South America).
I remember overhearing that one conversation between our MCR president and his friend (Another Cambridge term, “MCR” stands for “Middle Combination Room,” which refers to the graduate student community within a college), when standing in the line in front of the buttery one day. The president, a nice, outspoken guy, mentioned something about having an International Officer on the MCR committee. “Why would you need an International Officer when more than half of the committee is made up of international students?” I wasn’t sure I agreed with that statement, but it did make me think for a second.
With a few people I’ve met here who also did their undergrad at Cambridge I’ve asked about their experience of being part of the JCR (“Junior Combination Room”, the undergraduates). Apparently the JCR is predominated by UK students, and the cultural composition marks a big difference between the undergraduate and postgraduate communities at Cambridge. One of the transitions I had to deal with in my first weeks of being in the US was when our international student orientation ended and all the American students arrived. It felt like, not to sound political, some tribes all of a sudden being colonized, and the fun and ease quickly dispersed into a larger, more homogenous group, which couldn’t be called not nice but was just somehow less yours. This is probably not a good way to put it, though, taking one step back, isn’t the domination of western, in particular American education another form of colonization? The pressure of fitting in, before you have had the time to know yourself and know the other, quietly creeps in. And all you are left to do is to conceptualize, as best as you can, the experience of being the other yet not the other. But how do I sit down at a table with a group of people who are dressed up differently and talk so fast amongst themselves that I can barely understand? I don’t know if I ever found answers to such questions, despite the fact that I was taking a class on race and educational inequality in my first semester of undergrad. It was just with time such questions became less of a problem.
Back to Cambridge, so I do wonder if I would have felt something more similar to that if I’d come to the UK as an undergrad. That’s what I meant when I said my experience today has as much to do with my being a graduate student as with other changes that have happened inside and outside. It’s so common here to sit at a dining table, or hang out in one of the kitchens at our house, and find everyone present coming from a different country. And that difference comes so naturally that you barely notice it. I guess as postgraduates we are also more mature than we were a few years ago. Most people are more specialized in their interests, and have learned to listen and to live with differences better than the first time we went into the world. Diversity in discipline is another thing that has amazed me. Among the few hundred graduate students you find all sorts of subjects of study. At dinner you chat enthusiastically with an MPhil of East Asian studies about some cultural phenomenon shared among China, Japan and Korea. And then you go to a wine reception and meet a PhD in Biochemistry, who says he’ll introduce his research project briefly but goes on and on about an experiment on a cell you can’t even name, and you keep nodding your head with a smile as if you’ve understood something. Over time you get used to such pretense, and accept that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an amazing opportunity to live with a group of people studying all sorts of things and (mostly) passionate about what they are studying. I do often feel just as ignorant talking to linguistics or literature students. But it’s okay because the neuroscience PhD next to you who claims to study consciousness just seems as lost as you are in terms of what you are doing.
That same sense of being in an international community is also there in my linguistics department. Maybe not a great thing to say, but I did feel somewhat a comfort when I heard the non-native accent of more than one professor. They are still the intimidating people who have published books on the pioneering concepts of the field, but they are also international, and they probably have been through all that I am going through now. The difference in their nationality, cultural background and way of speaking just dissolved into all other differences there could be between you and me.
Well, that is not to say we won’t have Halloween parties, where people will most likely dress up quite dramatically and I will find myself again not knowing what to do with my body. But that’s not to be worried about now. To bridge some differences the first thing I should do is to get back to my study.