International week starts with culture-shock forum

Twelve people met in the William Pitt Union yesterday to discuss their personal experiences… Twelve people met in the William Pitt Union yesterday to discuss their personal experiences with culture shock. The group, made up of 10 students and two Pitt faculty members, had backgrounds ranging from a Brazilian native to an resident assistant with hopes of studying abroad.

“I just wanted to see what people had to say about their experiences outside of this culture,” Cassandra Uiselt, freshman, said.

As a part of the International Week events, Residence Life sponsored an intimate forum for people to discuss past and present personal experiences with different cultures.

In the Union’s Dining Room A, chairs were arranged in the shape of a square to encourage participants to face one another while discussing. One by one, each person introduced himself, and the discussion got underway.

“Culture shock occurs in four phases,” resident director Haylee Shacklock-Frank, said.

She said the first phase is called the honeymoon phase when people see their new location as a fantasyland.

The second phase is the negotiation phase – a phase when the foreigner begins to observe the cultural differences and feel homesick.

During the third phase, coined “Everything is okay,” the visiting person re-learns to enjoy his new location.

The fourth phase deals with the readjustment the person must make when they return home from their time spent in a different culture.

Among the attendees who gathered to share their stories were Christopher Chidueme, a freshman who recently came to the United States after spending his high school career in Nigeria; Juliana Seltzer, a senior who moved to the States from Brazil seven years ago and has been living in Pittsburgh since; Mimi Terano, the international program coordinator for CCLD; and Sharon Podobnik, a junior whose study abroad appetite has been satisfied by stays in Australia, Germany and other parts of Europe.

“For the first three weeks in Germany, we were sheltered because it was a group of us that went, but then our leader dropped us off at our host family and told us to ‘live,'” Podobnik said. “My first night at dinner, I was sitting at a table looking at a plate of food I had never seen before.”

The group discussion touched on subjects regarding cultural relationships with time and availability of resources.

Chidueme gave insight into the relaxed nature of Nigerian people – he went through a daily schedule and joked about how someone could sleep from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. – and Terano reflected on her experience in India and her inability to get more than one activity accomplished per day.

As the discussion continued, the topic turned to the fears people had about visiting a foreign country. Freshman Uiselt and sophomore Jamie Niedecker expressed their anxiety about the language barrier if they ever traveled abroad.

“Talk to the little kids in the countries you visit,” Pitt senior Zachary Walko said. “If you read children’s books and learn children’s games, you can learn the native language a lot faster.”

Chidueme and Podobnik also added that learning the foreign language from textbooks is nothing compared to the learning when you are immersed in the culture and interacting with the locals.

Foreign experiences were not the only forms of culture shock discussed during the gathering. Students also tackled the transition from high school to college and small towns to a major city.

“I had a class in high school of only five people. Coming to Pitt, I have been in big classes with hundreds of students,” Walko said. “It was a big transition for me, but honestly, I have loved it.”