What I Learnt From International Students

A Student Edge writer shares her personal experience.

At the beginning of Year 10, I switched schools to attend an international college for my senior years. It was a big change, going from the local public school to one where there were only four Anglo-Australians in my year. But it was the best change I could have made. The rest of the cohort boarded at the school, and came from various parts of Asia.

I look back on those three years as the best of my life; where I learnt so many things from my classmates. Here’s what studying with international student taught me.

Cultures are more diverse than you could imagine.

Before going to school with a bunch of international students, I understood that different Asian countries and regions had different traditions, customs and cultures. However, it wasn’t until I had conversations with students from many of those countries that I understood that diversity in a way Wikipedia or Google simply could not explain.

My classmates taught me about their families, their lives and where they’re from, and the school also did a great job of promoting our multiculturalism. We had an annual international festival, where students cooked food from their countries and sold it to the public, and put on a concert. Students were encouraged to share their experiences and we celebrated our differences and sameness.

You will learn more foreign languages from your friends than your teachers.

I learnt way more foreign words and phrases from informal conversations with friends than I did in our Chinese classes. (Another plus about going to an international school: Mandarin was a compulsory part of the curriculum!)

To be fair, many of these phrases were inappropriate (they’re of course the ones I’ve remembered), but all in all, studying in an international environment was great for learning new things from new people.

You will have a bunch of tour guides when you travel overseas.

During school, I always had a ton of requests to travel overseas to visit my friends. After my final year of high school, I went on an Asian holiday with my family, and we finally took them up on that offer.

From Singapore to Hong Kong, my friends met us, showed us around and gave us a sneak peek into local life. Where else can you get such quality (and free) guided tours?

Holidays will be more boring than anticipated.

The one downside of friends being from other countries was their absence come school holidays. At the end of every term, most students would fly back home to see their family and friends, meaning I was left behind, bored, with seemingly nothing to do and no one to see.

On the flip side, this made going back to school something to look forward to, and first day back was (maybe surprisingly) met with excitement rather than dread.

Your friends will become family.

My classmates would be around at my house for dinner at least once a week, and we’d always hang out after school and on weekends. That’s the biggest thing I learnt from my international friends: how quickly strangers can become friends, and then family, no matter the language we speak, the colour of our skin or where we come from.

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