@TCKim
I can relate in the sense that I wished to have been put in international things in the beginning of college. I am not an American citizen but due to my green card status, I was placed into the regular "American" programs where I had nobody to teach me things all the "international students" are taught. I didn't have any mentors or families who could teach me what it takes to successfully adjust to universities in America. It almost felt like I was the first in the family to go to college (Although both my parents have completed high education in their passport countries!)

@mish.wsl
I remember how frustrating it was for a couple of years to have friends in uni that I met in all different occasions (organizations, volunteer activities, classes, churches, etc.). It was okay to have one-on-one meet ups with these friends but because they have their own social groups, and bringing all these friends into ONE social group seemed impossible, I felt like "floating" and not fitting in any where. If that makes any sense. :)

@MochiGreen
I noticed that white-washed minorities and international students barely hang out together. There is such a huge gap. And also there are students who don't fit in any of these groups (well, that includes me, too MichiGreen). I wonder if this gap can ever be brought together (Or maybe this question itself is not a good question. There's gotta be a better way to phrase it)

@Cati
I too do not understand why American college students drink cheep beer until they vomit. There are a lot of greek sororities/fraternities in my uni and it is a part of their culture it seems that they go out on the weekends (also over the weekdays) just to get drunk. I hope I am not overgeneralizing and if this is untrue I am open for corrections.

I just think that there are so many better ways to spend time and have fun you know? I would have preferred traveling 2 hours if it means to experience a new thing outside what could be boring "ordinary" campus life and get myself out there than stay in a tight "bubble." Many times I wished I had a car so I could drive somewhere where I could just watch the stars... it could be something simple and yet not ordinary. Or it could be something ordinary but seen in a different "perspective." And I think that's when I can learn the best, not confined to the typical.

@André
It is awesome you joined AISEC. I heard about AISEC for a while but it wasn't until senior year in uni that I really wished I had joined since freshman year. I only knew it was the largest international student organization until I attended their Global Village event and talked to my friends who were part of it, and realized this could have been the best student org I could have joined! -You get to have fun, develop friendships and mentorships, and teamworks while doing international activities.

I saw AISEC at Nanzan University in Japan as well. How do you like the experience with AISEC so far?

I decided to hang back and stay in my passport country (Philippines) in order to evaluate and try to appreciate it more. So I enrolled in University over here after getting my IB.

Here are my two cents (or rather, 5 comments) regarding this subject:

1. It felt really weird hearing the language I only heard at home (Filipino) being spoken in class and around campus. That rather put me off a little bit in the beginning, just because I wasn't used to it.
(I remember when my father got recalled, I commented to my mom as we were waiting for our flight to Manila in Changi Airport "wow, it's weird hearing Filipino all around me.")

2. I later found out that people initially saw me as rather pompous and loud, because I spoke mainly in English...
(I admit I was ashamed of my Filipino, because according to my cousins, I sounded like a middle-aged guy at that time, having learned most of my Filipino from my parents, LOL).

3. It took me a couple of months to do what I usually do, which is try to learn contemporary lingo, and try to fit in a little bit more.

4. I decided to join a couple of student organizations in an attempt to fit in a bit more. It was not a good experience at first, since the first organization I joined wasn't very welcoming, and it just didn't work out. I then found another organization, AIESEC, which was a lot more international-oriented, and I managed to fit in much better.

5. Now that I am almost done with college, I can say that staying here in the Philippines has taught me a lot more about my passport country, and I have learned to appreciate it more. I have also managed to get a better look into what needs to be done here.

@Cati-I know! I really disagree with American
college's party scene, especially since I go
to huge party school! I prefer

When I was in first year, it was so hard getting
used to college kids talking openly about sex
in public...
Maybe I wasn't really used to being surrounded
in very 'Western/American' environment
(In my school, over 50% of students are whites,
and most of my acquaintaces/friends are white-washed
people)

It's hard being International student, but who doesn't
feel like being International student, or any other labels
that people like to label me ('American' 'Korean-American'
'foreigner' 'FOB'....
I just think of myself as 'Korean who rolls over Western
(American) and Eastern (mostly Korean, but it also
have elements from other Asian countries like
Japan, China, Thailand etc, despite having 'nada'
experiences of living in these countries) worlds'

I think a lot of my problems were because of the specific type of college I went to- small, isolated, undergraduate, northeast US, liberal arts. It ended up completely defeating me in one year, so soon I'm going to start over on a different continent.

@TCKim- "3. Being an international student, but not really an International student."
This, definitely. Among some of the American students it was really popular to put on an act of being 'international' or 'cultured', which of course was annoying to almost everyone else. Not being a 'real' international student (one who had never lived in the US before), I never felt right going to international events or talking about differences to American ways of life (even regular childhood memories that happend to be outside the US) because that tends to attract everyone who likes to put on an internationalist act and repel everyone else because they think you're like that too.

People who take pride in being tolerant and openminded, but who all think the same on some subjects. One of the big subjects was leaving the college- if I mentioned I didn't want to stay there people looked at me like I had gone mad, not just students, but the professors secretaries and deans I had to talk to when I was applying to different places to go next year. There was nobody at the school who I could talk to about my decision to leave it, which just adds to the feeling of isolation.

I will never understand American college drinking culture. I'm an alcoholic because sometimes I'd like to have a nice drink when I'm studying, yet I'm no fun because I don't want to spend every weekend night in some crowded house with bad music where the main event of the night is drinking cheap beer until you throw up.

I didn't have so much trouble the way other people here did with students being friends in groups of their own ethnicity. Maybe because the college was so small but people didn't cluster in an exclusive way based on ethnicity or language- I ended up hanging out with Japanese students enough to pick up some of the language and now I've started studying it. But on the other hand, there still was a real sense of different ethnicities being distinctly different- often when I did or said something people didn't understand, they would say I was acting Asian or my behaviour suddenly makes more sense if they pretend I'm Asian (I heard this from Americans including Asian-Americans but not from international-Asian-Asians, and I still don't quite know what it's supposed to mean).

Last thing- isolation and lack of initiative. Campus was tiny but people could go a couple months never leaving except to the cafe across the street. It was only a 2-hour train to New York, but nobody ever wanted to go, they'd rather lay in bed complaining there was nothing to do. Or prefer to sit under a tree for hours instead of going to a political lecture they wouldn't even have to leave campus for. There was just no desire to experience anything else in life, everyone was satisfied to be trapped in that tiny campus-bubble forever. And then they thought I was strange because occasionally I went and did something by myself.

I drifted in and out of ethnic groups in college/uni mostly because I felt either excluded or the dynamics would change and the group itself would move on into other social groups. What I found that did work are interest/hobby groups and friends I made from activities that forced you to bond in trying circumstances. To this day, I am still good friends with certain classmates of an Art History Trek across Northern Greece gone wrong....

In my freshman year, I had tried to join various Asian American Student Associations and quickly found out that there is "particularism", a wierd feudal system grading you from pure white-washed ABC to various levels of FOBiness. And lets not forget the different dialects, parts of the "home country" caste/level of society your family was in back there and even which high schools you and your family went to! I still vividly remember sitting in an economics class and being talked about by various Asian (and non-Asian) cliques as "that girl" over there. No one suspected I could understand what they were saying about me and something told me to just keep quiet: I had decided then and there that I wasn't going to be part of that BS.

I received hate intra-university email from certain Asian Student Associations and had a few confrontations in hallways with strangers from those groups who had tracked me down and automatically decided I was a "blood traitor" or something in that nature simply because I was on a certain list, of a certain visa category, or had a "home" mailing address in a certain country. These search lists were all provided by the university's international students office supposedly to help foreign students get in touch with others from their home country. In this case it went very wrong, very quickly.

I think the main difference for TCKs is that we aren't automatically drawn socially to people because of ethnicity (probably because we are from more than one :) ) . That being said, TCKs have such individual heritages and experiences that sometimes you wouldn't even know that you met another TCK and even if you did know, there is no guarantee of instant friendship. While we've all been in the situation where we could almost jump another TCK out of excitement of meeting another one of us :) it rarely works out because we all have such unique experiences.

I'm currently in my first year of...well, uni rather than college.

I agree with MochiGreen, about the way groups tend to split into ethnicities. I have a bunch of Malaysian/Singaporean friends who all hang out with each other and know each other. But it's very difficult for me since I can barely relate to anything they're doing/saying.
I don't hang out with Australians since I can barely relate to them either. And they prefer to stay with their own ethnicity.
I currently hang out with friends I made in other countries who ended up in my university. Or else I generally have a varied mix of people for each lecture I attend. It's not easy though since I don't actually have a permanent set of friends at uni.

1. Fitting in....In my college, people seemed
to hang out w/ other ppl based on ethnicity etc.
Even within same ethnicity, white-washed
______ (insert any minority ethnicity here) and
International/FOB ______ had no business with
each other lol
I didn't belong to any category, so it was and it
is kind of still hard to feel belong in college
(despite the fact that I lived in States for almost 7 yrs,
and yeah, whites/white-washed people see me as
'weird' foreigner [some of them look down on me
because of that] while real International or FOBs
see me as American
My friends see me as Korean-American, but for
some reason, I dislike being labled as
Korean-American
Maybe because I am one of those 'crazy 'people
who can't see herself living in States forever
and I feel like I don't fit in States the longer I live
here


2. Except for my college best friend, ppl (back at
town where I lived at last yr of jr high and high school
and at town where I live for college) think it's
a big deal to travel to another country and roll
their eyes when I express a desire to move back
to Korea or live in foreign country
I want to roll back my eyes to them and ask
how the heck they manage to live in same
town or country for 10-20+ years
My college best friend understands my desire to
get out of (boring) California because she can't
stand living in California or living at same place
for 10-20+ years like me
Oh yeah...her ex boyfriend called her future
kids "cocky ass" since they will be TCK living
in different countries (she wants to be diplomat
for U.S.) LOL
And he never lived outside of States -0-
(geeze, he made monocultural ppl look bad!)

3. I can't talk to anybody about my dilemma
My visa will be soon changed to F-1 (student)
visa, but all of my friends have U.S. citizenship
or green card, so I have to explain everything
about immigration laws if I want to talk about it
Oh well, they don't understand how this affects
my dilemma to stay in States or go back to Korea
or understand that for two more years at least,
my Dad has to pay 10 times more expensive
money to let me stay in school than them

4. My Dad is at Korea, and he's the one who pays
the tuition, and his job helps me to pay for it too
so yeah, I have to go to billing office at end of
every quarter (my school runs in quarter system)
and get fee letter and send it to my Dad's home
what a hassle...-_-

The last time I attended International school was
5th grade, so what I'm going through in college
as TCK might be a lot different from most other
TCK haha

It didn't really seem like I was "struggling" at the time... but looking back I would say:
1. I went to a large state university, so a lot of people were from in-state, and could go home whenever they wanted to. They also had a built in network of friends from home that went to university together, and if friends didn't go to the same university, they could always go visit them at home on a random weekend. That was hard for me to see, because my friends from HS were scattered all over the world, and I still haven't seen some of them since graduation.
2. Staying in touch with my parents with a huge time difference (12 hours!) Skype was a godsend, but I always wished that I could just pick up the phone and call them in the afternoon on my walk back from class. Instead I had to "schedule" a time in advance to talk with them when we would both be online.
3. Being an international student, but not really an International student. Because I am American and go to an American university, I wasn't really considered international, but I wish I had been included in more international things in the beginning, because I was going through a lot of the same problems as international students.

That's all that I can think of now... but I'd love to hear other people's responses.