In your Sept. 30 issue in the article on international students ("UB's international attraction") you quote Steven Shaw, the director of international admissions as saying that international students are attracted to UB because of "their desire to be immersed in the culture of an American university." I would like to challenge that statement based on my own experiences.
I myself am an international student, the only graduate student from Switzerland at UB, in fact, and have been in the United States for over six years now. Over the years, I have benefited the most from integrating and assimilating myself into American culture and society.
The same cannot be said for many foreigners at UB, unfortunately. As a rule, I practically never see one foreigner by themselves, but always in a group of others of their kind. No matter whence they came, such people only seem to congregate with their own kind and never with uniquely and mostly American social groups.
Whenever someone asks me why I don't "hang" with Europeans, I tell them that if I wanted to hang out with Europeans I'd go home. Only coming here to study, though, almost constitutes leeching in my opinion. Considering that no international organization (such as the increasingly irrelevant United Nations) can force the United States to grant entry to foreign nationals, international students should be grateful for the opportunity the U.S. government has granted them and repay the American people to some extent by at least showing some respect for American culture. I sure do love my Swiss cheese (the imported kind), but again I do not need to be here to enjoy that.
So take it from someone who knows: if foreign governments claim that Americans are arrogant and superficial, they're lying more than a North Korean radio broadcast. I have never seen or experienced a nation and a people greater than that of the United States and the only thing that will bite are the sharks off the coasts.
Photo: Breadchastick / Wikimedia Commons
