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Do you find it difficult to adjust to life in a different country or find yourself missing your home country, and what advice do you have for students experiencing similar feelings?
Yes,extremely tough to adjust to a new place, even for studying elsewhere e for 10 years, I still find it tough to adjust to new environment. You are thrilled to start a new life, but still insanely miss friends and family.
My solution to this problem is :
First,constantly tell yourself this is normal,do not have pressures and choke yourself.
Second,contact your friends and family to exchange your feelings and let them know you miss and care about them. Their love and support will cure you from desperate.
Third, hanging out with others and try to have something fun in your life. You have to remember that you are away from your home for a reason, and creating a happy life is very first crucial part of it.
Wish you find my answer helpful,please let me know you have other questions.
One way to overcome this is to seek out groups that aid international students in their transition. Usually a lot of university or foreign exchange programs have this. This can be a good way to transition because students can meet with others who are going through the same thing and they can give them advice.
If you find difficulty in adjusting to a new country, the best advice that I can give is to have a routine. Make every Thursday afternoon grocery shopping day, for example, and go to the same market. If you enjoy going to the gym, find a gym to join and make it a habit to go there. Be a regular at a small coffee shop, and study there once a week for example. Walk around your new city and get to know it well. Find a park to walk through. Don’t not stay connected with your family and friends at home, but make it a point not to feel that FOMO (fear of missing out) and explore your new city with gusto. 🙂
It can be so difficult to feel comfortable in a foreign place. There are a couple of things that can be done to help get rid of some of that loneliness. You can skype friends, family, relatives, etc…. Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with people. Depending on the country, you could go out and eat your nation´s food. Definitely go out of your way to make friends and meet new people. There are always people looking to learn your language and it will be a good way for yourself to learn a new language (if that is something you´re trying to do).
I would sometimes have trouble adjusting when I was abroad. I would feel annoyed by constantly being stared at, and overwhelmed at how it was seen as odd to want to hang out by myself sometimes. I talked to my host family about my concerns, and we had several conversations about curiosity and introversion. It helped me to better understand that none of it was actually personal.
I would definitely suggest talking to someone about your frustrations. Sometimes talking about it helps to articulate what exactly is the matter. There are several resources for helping students adjust to being abroad, and someone might be able to point you in the right direction to finding some specific to what it is you’re feeling. It may take a little digging to find helpful solutions to what’s bothering you, especially if it concerns aspects of your identity abroad, but it’s worth it to seek them out. Acknowledge your discomfort so you can move past it, and try to push yourself (if only in baby steps) to better understand something a bit more about your host-culture each day. Talk to someone new, ask questions, and engage your surroundings. If it’s a matter of homesickness, don’t be afraid to give your family a call, or seek out a familiar food. It’s okay to have an occasional, comforting reminder of home, but try not to overdo it. You’re there to experience the unfamiliar as well!
When you’re having a hard time adapting it’s really important to reach out to other people. Find someone who understands what you’re going through with whom you can talk to and share experiences and advice that can give you a sense of familiarity and help lessen your pains. Also, it helps to keep yourself involved. Maybe joining groups and organizations or starting a new hobby. At first, it’ll be like creating a distraction for yourself, but over time you’ll begin to enjoy it, look forward to it, and feel integrated into your new country.
If the strangeness of being surrounded by another culture is difficult, or if you feel alone without having the community you always had around you—take a deep breath. There is nothing wrong with you or with the feelings you’re experiencing. In fact, cherish it, because it means you are learning and growing. Being a third culture kid myself, I feel more at home when I’m abroad and surrounded by strangers than when I’m in America, where everything is familiar. But I did not always feel that way. When I went on my first long-term study abroad, it was for six and half months and after a few weeks of trying to look at everything on the positive side, it really dawned on me (when I lost my smartphone—my connection to the world—in a taxi) that I was all alone there. There was only one other girl in my program, therefore I could not simply make friends with my (nonexistent) classmates. Throughout the program, I did end up meeting many locals and making friends. But it required planning and arranging a meeting every time, since they were not people I could just go out to lunch with after class. It also meant that I would end up forming friendships with my teachers who were, yes, older than me, but also wiser and had so much more to offer than friends my age (especially considering they all had lived through and remembered the war their country had experienced in the 90’s). The takeaway from my experience is that: firstly, it set me on a path to understanding that it is healthy for people to be by themselves because it means you’re thinking and analyzing your surroundings, which leads to self-understanding and self-development. It took another study abroad for me to actually start enjoying spending time by myself and truly understand the benefits of being a person who is comfortable when she’s by herself. The second is that, I can now go abroad anywhere and don’t get that freak-out moment anymore, because I permanently changed by the end of those six months. It may have been painful in the beginning, but it left me a stronger person. My advice is cherish the pain of being alone or the strangeness of culture shock—it’s a sign that there is so much you’re learning right now. And you won’t even realize how much you’ve learned until you return back home.