Since I have decided to study abroad, I have long expected my biggest issue to face would be trying hard to deal with challenges from diverse aspects of life, about my academic study, about making new friends and about caring for myself when I am parted with my parents. But it turns out that I can always manage to balance my life both academically and daily, due to my extra effort and thanks to the support of professors and friends. However, getting along with others, I find the most challenging thing is to keep my confidence while trying to fit in and socialize. The confidence shows in various features—when we speak and chat using another language that we are not really familiar with, when we experience and adjust to culture
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I thought I was prepared enough. Participating in clubs and working hard for all kinds of tests, memorizing esoteric words and native idioms, I got high scores and received offer from my dream school. Watching American movies and TV series and reading English books, I tried to catch a glimpse of their lives and trained myself to be familiar with reading and scanning. Despite all my efforts, there are still huge gap which I could never fill up between me and native speakers. I can recall all the details about my first math class when I can hardly catch my professor and classmates. I can understand the knowledge in math expressions, but got confused about what the abbreviations stand and even had no ideas about how to read the formula and speak out my solution—I had to focus on English rather than math. Also I do not know how to react when my professors told jokes that I can barely understand. I got so depressed with this math class and so disappointed with myself. I started to doubt myself that whether I can deal with all these …show more content…
It is what I learned from stories about my name. Before I came here, I got in touch with my roommate and told her that she can call me my English name if she considered it hard to articulate my Chinese name. But she told me she really wanted to learn how to read it and call me using my real name. Later I asked another friend whether she thought pronouncing my Chinese name to be a little inconvenient, but she answered without hesitation that she was willing to call me my real name—everyone could practice to pronounce it because it was just a name. I suddenly realized that I was just being unconfident about myself, even unconfident about my identity. I tried to give myself an English name because I assumed this would help me fit in easier but I was not aware that it was useless to consider about English name because no matter how pretty this name could be, it would never be my name. My Chinese name comes from my culture and accompanies me throughout my life with my identity towards myself, and I should feel proud of it. I was shocked at the sudden understanding that my lack of confidence about my name represents my lack of confidence about my identity. I have always wanted my friends to regard me and have impression on me based on my real name, the name
I thought I was prepared enough. Participating in clubs and working hard for all kinds of tests, memorizing esoteric words and native idioms, I got high scores and received offer from my dream school. Watching American movies and TV series and reading English books, I tried to catch a glimpse of their lives and trained myself to be familiar with reading and scanning. Despite all my efforts, there are still huge gap which I could never fill up between me and native speakers. I can recall all the details about my first math class when I can hardly catch my professor and classmates. I can understand the knowledge in math expressions, but got confused about what the abbreviations stand and even had no ideas about how to read the formula and speak out my solution—I had to focus on English rather than math. Also I do not know how to react when my professors told jokes that I can barely understand. I got so depressed with this math class and so disappointed with myself. I started to doubt myself that whether I can deal with all these …show more content…
It is what I learned from stories about my name. Before I came here, I got in touch with my roommate and told her that she can call me my English name if she considered it hard to articulate my Chinese name. But she told me she really wanted to learn how to read it and call me using my real name. Later I asked another friend whether she thought pronouncing my Chinese name to be a little inconvenient, but she answered without hesitation that she was willing to call me my real name—everyone could practice to pronounce it because it was just a name. I suddenly realized that I was just being unconfident about myself, even unconfident about my identity. I tried to give myself an English name because I assumed this would help me fit in easier but I was not aware that it was useless to consider about English name because no matter how pretty this name could be, it would never be my name. My Chinese name comes from my culture and accompanies me throughout my life with my identity towards myself, and I should feel proud of it. I was shocked at the sudden understanding that my lack of confidence about my name represents my lack of confidence about my identity. I have always wanted my friends to regard me and have impression on me based on my real name, the name