To almost everybody it appears that being an international student is one of the most exiting things in the world. You travel around the world, see different cultures, learn another language and make a lot of new friends. But is it really that spectacular or is the life or an international student just regular. That was the question I asked myself when I went on a survey around Swinburne university.

Swinburne is a very internationally focused university, over half of the students is foreign which made it the perfect place to start my search for international students. I just walked around the university grounds and found lots of international students. The thing that stood out to me from the very beginning was their level of English. I expected that, to be accepted at the university, the level had to be quite high, but that wasn’t the case at all. I found that a lot of the students had trouble understanding me and I have to admit that I had some trouble understanding them too sometimes. I can imagine that this is also a big barrier for them in their regular life because it is just hard to have a good conversation when you cannot speak the language very well. This also seemed to be one of the biggest concerns to the students when they first arrived. They were especially worried about their accommodation, finding a job, but mostly about the communication.

Even though most of their communication skills are quite bad all of them felt good being in Australia. One of the students said: ‘I feel accepted, but my English isn’t very good, so I sometimes have a hard time’. The university has also helped them greatly with moving here and getting everything in order. They have gotten a lot of information and tips from the university, but also of fellow students: ‘they gave me advice, which I followed and it helped’.

One of the things that seemed to be quite hard was to get some experiences out of them. I asked for the good experiences first, which were all quite general. They said things like: ‘just the going to the university and being able to study here’ or ‘living in the big city and enjoying all of the people around me’. But they couldn’t really come up with any bad experiences, which is quite weird, because when you go to a foreign country there are always some awkward or bad moments. There were some guys that had trouble with finding a good job and actually getting paid for it. They told me that they had done some work sometime and that they didn’t get the money they deserved.

Now one of the things that I was very eager to find out was the difference between their own country and Australia. The answers surprised me: It was the multicultural lifestyle in Australia. There are obviously so many different people with so many different nationalities and that was something that really stood out to them when they first came here.

After talking to all of these students it definitely appears that being an international student is a lot of fun and all of them really enjoy being in Australia, but it isn’t as glamorous and spectacular as everybody thinks. After a while you just get used to the being in a different country and living another live and I think that that is one of the biggest reasons why most of them didn’t know yet if they actually want to spend the rest of their lives in Australia.