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A PhD Examined: Changing Countries

My Experience in Grad School as an International Student

Joe Riad
7 min readOct 20, 2024

Grad school is hard enough, but it’s harder when you’re an international student. Aside from the obvious homesickness international students deal with, there are also cultural and educational differences they have to navigate successfully during their program, not to mention the extra paperwork they have to go through.

My aim in writing this article is to illustrate such differences through my own experience with the understanding that not all parts of this article will resonate with everybody. Hopefully you’ll get at least some amusing anecdotes out of it.

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My Experience

First, a bit about my personal background. Even though I was born in Egypt, I spent my formative school years in Abu Dhabi, UAE. The culture there was very cosmopolitan and I met people from all over the world. I also consumed a lot of popular media from the US. All this to say that I already had experience in living and working in a diverse environment and had exposure to American culture long before starting my grad program. This means that my transition to living and working in the US was already easier than that of many of my peers who didn’t have such a background. You may therefore find me glossing over things that are difficult for many international students such as language and culture barriers.

My first “culture shock” upon starting my grad program was a very pleasant one. When I went on campus before classes started to figure out what paperwork I needed to get ready, I was given a big list of things I had to get done, signed, stamped,… I figured it would take me a good week to get through all this red tape. As soon as I got started, I found things going so smoothly that I had finished everything in one afternoon. I was very pleasantly surprised and learned the lesson that bureaucracy at the university wasn’t so bad and many things can be facilitated online, whether it’s filling application forms or making appointments so you don’t have to stand in line that long.

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Another pleasant surprise was how open and beautiful my campus was. I remember asking some students on my first day about where the “main gate” of campus was and getting back a blank stare. Where I come from college campuses are closed to the public and only students, faculty, and staff are allowed in. So it was very nice to be able to go to campus whenever I felt like it and being able to walk around and enjoy the sights.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment I had to make at first was learning to live without a car. I spent the first year of grad school without a car and I naively thought that it would be OK since I could just take public transportation. Admittedly, some US cities are better than others for public transportation options, but Texas in general seems to fare poorly in this regard. As I mentioned briefly in another article, a car is more of a necessity than a luxury in Texas. Living without a car meant that I had to time my comings and goings to coincide with the university bus system schedule. I had to plan my routes to go as close to bus stops as possible. I had to do a lot of walking. For errands that required a car (e.g. doing groceries), I had to rely on my friends who already had cars.

A very pleasant social difference that I discovered was how friendly everyone was. This of course tends to vary a lot by region in the US, but my experience in Texas has been really positive. It’s very common for total strangers on the street to smile and nod in your direction or even greet you in a friendly manner. Most people I have met were really helpful as well. This might not sound like a big deal, but it can be really nice when you need it.

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In terms of differences in the educational system, I can think of at least 4:

  • You are free to choose your educational track (after fulfilling your mandatory course requirements). I have taken classes from the mechanical engineering and math departments during my degree. This kind of freedom of choice is very empowering and allows you to make the most of your degree instead of following a set path of subjects as I was used to in Egypt.
  • Culture tends to be somewhat less formal. Of course everybody is expected to respect their professors but it wasn’t uncommon for me to see students calling their advisors by first name, something totally unheard of in Egypt.
  • The university had more amenities and resources that were really helpful during my program. One of the best things I remember is that the university library had a program whereby you could request a book that wasn’t available in the library and they would borrow it from another library and lend it to you. There were also resources to help with technical writing and research, along with an active graduate student body government that represented the graduate student interests with the administration.
  • People treated their programs differently. Back home I was used to my fellow students treating grad school like a simple extension of college: attend classes and maybe do some research on the side whenever you had time free after your day job. In my PhD program, grad school was people’s job and some people treated it as a strict 9-to-5 job and would go home after a certain hour. Other people practically lived in the lab and spent inordinate amounts of time working on their research.
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Making the Transition Easier

So what made this transition easier? I’m going to mention four
contradictory things that helped me.

  1. Making friends from a similar background to mine
  2. Making friends from a different background to mine
  3. Assimilating into the culture
  4. Keeping my identity

The obvious thing to do when faced with a cultural transition and homesickness is to find people with a similar cultural background to yours. I did that and it was very helpful: I made friends with my fellow Egyptian students. Being around people from my same culture made the transition a lot easier, since they knew about all the shocks and surprises I was going through.

That being said, I tried to avoid limiting myself to befriending people from my own culture. I wanted the enriching experience of making friends with people from all over the world. This is definitely something I couldn’t easily get back home. It was a truly wonderful part of my grad school experience and I have made very close friendships with people from very different and diverse cultural backgrounds. Many of these friendships flourish to this day. I want to emphasize this point because I noticed many other international students take the path of least resistance and stick to social circles from their own countries. I think that this risks missing out on a great deal of what an international college degree has to offer and I highly encourage you to avoid that.

Another thing that helped me was to assimilate into the new culture I was living in. This meant learning and following new social conventions (pedestrian and driving etiquette being particular standouts for me), exploring different pastimes, eating new food, and consuming different media. This is what helped me make the transition from “this is a new culture I have to adapt to” to “this feels like a second home”. Making friends from other countries really helped speed that along as the social conventions of US culture were one thing we were guaranteed to have in common.

Finally, it was important for me to keep my own sense of identity as well. Assimilating into a new culture doesn’t have to mean shedding your old identity. I still try to eat the food I grew up eating every chance I get. I still read Arabic books and listen to Arabic music every now and then. It is important to me that my future children grow up learning to speak Arabic. This doesn’t weaken my assimilation, but enriches it.

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Concluding Thoughts

Adapting to a new culture isn’t easy, especially when you know you will have to stay in it for several years on end. The best thing that I found works for many people is to rely on friends to make a family away from home. This allows you to have a support system, form new cultural ties, and maintain your cultural identity, all in your own unique blend that will undoubtedly be much richer for the experience.

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