International Students Also Have Some Advantages!
Most of the time, we, as international students, would be asked to list the challenges we faced in college, which I think is quite easy, as I could come up with lots of difficulties within a short period of time: the new language, the new environment, and the great cultural differences between this new country and my home country. Actually, before examining this topic, I haven’t thought about that we could also have some benefits because of our identity as international students. After considering about this question for a while and discussing with my roommates, we think up the only advantage we believe we may have: sometimes it may be easier for us to have a better performance in science subjects, because we may have done more exercise problems over those subjects since we were young.
For example, I remember that once in a Physics 1 section when our Chinese TA was showing us the solution of a problem on the board, he did all the calculation in his mind and finished the problem very quickly. My group mate was shocked and asked me why he can finish the calculation part so quickly. Well, the answer is that Chinese students have done tons of calculation problems since we were very young. We even started to learn that when we were still in kindergarten, because Chinese parents like to see if their children could do simple calculations more quickly and memorize more poems than their peers. Later, when we grew up and started to learn physics in 8th grade, our teachers would always assign us lots of homework problems, while many of the problems are of the same kind but just have different numbers. Practice makes perfect. This is Chinese way of education, and it works as sometimes we may be able to solve the problems in science subjects more quickly compared to our classmates now.
Furthermore, especially for the students graduated from traditional Chinese high schools, not like me who is graduated from an international high school in China (the kind of high schools that prepare us to study aboard in the future), they would learn more difficult science courses than us. I remember that during the last quarter, one of my chemistry classmates, who is graduated from traditional Chinese high school, told us that he was actually familiar with most of the concepts taught in that course before taking it, while I was just familiar with some of them. Finally, he got an A+, and I got an A. However, undeniably, no matter how much we have learnt before, it may still be easier for us to comprehend and have a deeper understanding of those concepts once we have learnt something about them before and thus get a better grade in those science subjects.
