The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

an Haight was born in Kenya, spent the first decade of his life living in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and then moved with his family to Italy for middle school and high school. A self- proclaimed “Europeanized White African- American,” Ian found adjusting to Bowdoin College in small-town Maine a bit rocky. “Culture shock hit me pretty hard. I realized that I wasn’t just here this time for a few months or relaxation; I was here to live and work in college. I felt really far away from home.” Almost all college freshmen go through an adjustment period when they head off to school. But the Foreign Service or Third Culture Kid — someone who has spent most or all of his life living in at least one foreign country — gets hit with a double whammy. “The particularly challenging aspect for this group is that they are so invisible,” says Anne P. Copeland, Ph.D., execu- tive director of the Interchange Institute and co-author of Understanding American Schools: The Answers to New- comers’ Most Frequently Asked Questions (Interchange Institute, 2001, 2005). “They look American, sound American, are American. And so, unlike their international student classmates, no one (including them, perhaps) expects them to be having culture shock, or to need cultur- al information. They are adding this to the normal stresses of moving away from family and encountering the academ- ic and social demands of college, but these cultural issues are harder for being unexpected and invisible.” What to Expect If you’re a Foreign Service or Third Culture Kid who has lived most of your life overseas, what can you expect from your first few months at college in America? • You may feel “different.” Everyone comes to college feeling a bit insecure about how they’ll fit in, but for Third Culture Kids this feeling is likely to be compounded. “It was very easy to feel out of place as a freshman. You just assume that everyone else is more in tune — more American,” says Mark Mozur, a 2005 graduate of Harvard University who has lived in Eastern Europe and South America. “During the first day of orientation, I listened to many other incoming freshmen bonding over their common New England backgrounds,” recalls Elisabeth Frost, a recent graduate of Bates College. “When people asked me where I was from, I felt like I was telling them my entire life story: Guinea, Mexico, Honduras, and Brazil, with only two ele- mentary school years in the U.S.” • You may not know how things work — but you’ll learn quickly. TCKs can face many of the same adjust- ment problems as international students. College of the Overwhelmed (Jossey-Bass, 2004) authors Richard Kadison and Theresa Foy DiGeronimo posit that international stu- dents are “thinking about every move. … How do I choose from two dozen different laundry detergents, and how do I turn on this washing machine? Conscious living gets very tiring.” Some FS kids “can lack the basic skill of taking care of themselves, because they’ve always had a maid to tend to them,” observes Katia Miller, a sophomore at the College of William and Mary, who spent her high school years in Peru. There, as in most developing countries where labor is plen- tiful and salaries low, domestic help is the norm, even for middle-class families. Yet TCKs also learn to be self-sufficient very quickly. Along with international students, they’re often left alone on campus for at least one holiday, and while other kids’ parents arrive at end-of-term with the minivan to help their kids Continued on page 66 64 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT G OING TO C OLLEGE IN A MERICA ( OR , H OW TO P REPARE Y OURSELF FOR THE W EIRDEST C ULTURE OF A LL : Y OUR O WN ) B Y F RANCESCA H UEMER K ELLY Francesca Huemer Kelly, a Foreign Service spouse presently based in Brussels, is a professional freelance writer who is published regularly in American and inter- national magazines. She is a founder of Tales from a Small Planet (talesmag.com ), was the Web site’s editor-in- chief from 1999 to 2003, and currently serves in an advi- sory capacity. Also a trained concert singer, Ms. Kelly has lived in Milan, Leningrad, Moscow, Belgrade, Vienna, Ankara and Rome. She is the mother of four children. I