Personal Narrative-International Student Analysis

The biggest setback for me was the time when I first entered university. I am an international student who left her home and came here by myself. I didn’t have any relatives or friends in the United States, and I had trouble in understanding what people said at the most of time. This was not the worst, since I even got a bad cold during 13 hours flight. Many international students might have similar experiences like me. No parents, no friends, everything was unknown. Orientation was not that bad, because students were mostly from the same country and I could chat with them without any problems. Although I knew that I came here for learning and I should use English to communicate with others, I always stayed silent or sometimes even ran away …show more content…
Illness and loneliness made me feel very uncomfortable. My dreams of the life in university broke, and I started to miss my parents. But I quickly abandoned such a negative manner when I found there were many interesting clubs in this university. After the orientation ended, I met another difficulty that I could not understand what was talking about in my major course. I attended each early class in the morning and wrote down everything the professor typed, but I found it really helpless. We were required to do our coding assignments in lab with one partner and my first partner was also a Korean international student who had some backgrounds in learning programming. She found that I had problems in understanding those questions, so she waited until I finished reading the questions and explained how to do it to me. I was lucky to finish the first and the easiest assignment with her help, but the following assignments were really like challenges for me. I had no previous experience or understanding about programming and it was too hard for me. I got 1 out of 4 in my third assignment, because my partner and I did wrong in most of the questions. I was so upset that I thought maybe Computer Science major was not the right major for me. I wanted to give up, but I had no choice. I would fail the class, or tried to do something to catch up. Suddenly, I realized that I had to change and make …show more content…
Every time I feel upset, I will get courage from past experiences. I learn that I should be brave and make my first step even when I enter a new environment. I will take advantages of the resources that are provided for me and maximize the uses of these resources. My objective is to continue my learning in Computer Science and gain more experiences from doing research. I am writing this to apply for the Master of Science program at University of Washington, and I believe my past experiences, academic preparations and personal qualities have prepared me to be a qualified member for your