Difficulties means deficiencies

If you ask me about the difficulties that I am facing as an international student in UCSB, I can keep talking for a few hours. Since I am living by myself without the support by my parents, I have to take care of myself. I need to wake myself up every day, cook for myself as much as possible to save money and wash my own clothes — which was mostly done by my mom when I was at home. However, the biggest problem that I need to face is to understand the lectures.

When I first came to UCSB studying for summer session, I feel that following the professors’ words and understand what they are teaching in short time is very hard. It’s not hard to comprehend this difficulty since we international students need to understand something that we don’t know about before in a second language. The concepts in Chinese may already be hard for use to understand, not to mention in English. However, I find this a very big problem since the lectures are pretty important for us because the points that are emphasized by the professor should be paid more attention to in order to help me enhance study effiency. So I tried to think of ways to solve this problem.

At first, I tried to record the professor’s lecture by my cell phone, but it wasn’t of good sound quality. Then I tried to take photo of all the slides that the professor uses during lectures but I found that it affects my listening to the lecture. Later I asked my sister — who is already a senior studying in the U.K. for help. She said I could try to preview the materials that the professor will be talking about during lectures before the lecture. I tried to do so and found it really helps my understanding a lot.

In a word, when we have difficulties, that means we have deficiencies that needs to be improved. I am always trying hard to solve all the difficulties that I meet in my daily life.