Internationally speaking

Corridors of the North Lake College are bubbling with new students and conversations in languages you don’t necessarily recognize. No wonder: North Lake has about a thousand international students from nearly 80 different countries from all over the world.

Better education, more opportunities or just a chance to try something new have motivated these people to come to study in the United States. But what do they think about North Lake? The News-Register decided to take a poll and asked a few students the following questions.

1. Why and how did you come to the United States?
2. What do you study in North Lake College?
3. What do you like about North Lake?
4. What needs to be improved?
5. What has surprised you the most?

Manuel Peña Mexico	1.	I came to the U.S. four years ago, because there are a lot more opportunities to work, educate and earn money than in Mexico.
	2.	I’m working on an associates but my major is psychology.
	3.	I have been in other colleges and they have been more racially based than North Lake. This is very nice college with lots of points of view, so you can open your mind here.
	4.	Parking is a problem! You’ve got to get here very early if you want to find a space.
	5.	This stunned me: North Lake is a community college, not a university, but there are lots of exchange programs, for example, to Rome.
Tytti Luhava-Kaariainen Finland	1.	I came to the U.S. with my husband, who works for Nokia. While here, I want to study.
	2.	I take a Spanish course.
	3.	I think it’s nice that at North Lake it is possible to take just a few courses, not only to study for a degree.
	4.	It would be nice to have more language courses, like German or Italian.
	5.	It is astonishing how friendly and cheerful people are here. Also, the library has a good variety of books and enough computers.
Jobin Kalathil Bahrain	1.	My family moved to the U.S. so that I can have a better education.
	2.	I am doing my prerequisites for pharmacy.
	3.	I have lots of opportunities to meet different kinds of people and make friends. Besides this, North Lake College is close to my home.
	4.	In my opinion, we need to have more classes for science and math.
	5.	I was surprised by the fact that most of my instructors take a lot of trouble to help the students in every way they can. And some of my instructors have worked with NASA!
Nishelli Perera Sri Lanka	1.	I came to the United States last July by myself and I live with my aunt now. I came here because I wanted to go to college.
	2.	My major is in economics and finance.
	3.	I really like the campus and the thing that there are people from different countries. In some of my classes, there are more people from other countries than from America — that is neat!
	4.	The difficulties I have had are not with the campus. I have to do lots of paperwork because of my F1 [immigration] status. I can’t work outside the campus only inside and so on.
	5.	I expected culture shock, but it didn’t happen. I also expected people to be very different here, but I guess people are the same wherever you go in the world.