Individual thought on Challenges and Benefits of Interviewing an International Student

Since there are a lot of differences between countries, people are usually curious and get question marks in mind. Interviewing a person who comes from another country is a solution, which brings both challenges and benefits to the interviewer. As an undergraduate student, interviewing an international student means the interviewer has to consider who would be the interviewee and then might face a hard time to find the ways approaching a person due to differences in lifestyles. However, besides those challenges, interviewing an international student is a great way to achieve knowledge about different cultures. Interviewing bring us benefits of discovering other cultures as well as lifestyles and on the other hand, reflect our own culture by looking at people ways of thinking.

To interview an international student, the first step is looking for an appropriate person obviously. However, this is a concern since a lot of people have never been interviewing or even talking to an international student. According to a research from an International Students Interviewing classroom by Alderman, “two-third of the students had infrequent or rare interactions with international students”. Therefore, finding an interviewee is hard, approaching him is even harder. Due to the differences in lifestyle, each person has his own way to start a conversation. In this case, the interviewer might not know if the student would open and welcome questions or not. According to Alderman, “Students were very apprehensive and stressed until they actually approached somebody”. However, “once they did, they were pleasantly surprised by the willingness of the international student to participate in the interview, and enjoyed the rest of the exercise”. At this point, an interviewer will achieve benefits of interviewing an international student. He will get an opportunity to discover another culture by getting closer to the interviewee and asking questions. “She was super friendly, and I learned a lot from her culture”, a girl from Alderman’s research said after she had interviewed a Chinese student. On the other hand, by openly talking to an international student, interviewers would see ways the student think about the two cultures and from that reflect their own cultures.

In conclusion, interviewing an international student make people face some challenges finding and approaching interviewees at first but obviously, the interviewing process would bring many benefits since interviewers will be able to achieve knowledge about another cultures as well as their own culture.

Worcited:
Alderman, Derek. "academia.edu." Border Crossing in the Classroom:. N.p., 01 2004. Web. 15 Oct 2012. <http://www.academia.edu/1029548/Border_crossings_in_the_classroom_The_international_student_interview_as_a_strategy_for_promoting_intercultural_understanding>.