CGDSD Presenting at ACPA20

It has been an anxious 2020 so far. With the Coronavirus spreading globally, ACPA 2020 Nashville seems like a decade ago. Many things have changed in the past two weeks. My good friend and co-presenter Viva and I were grateful that we were able to share the topic that we studied with our higher-ed colleagues on March 4th before the virus outbreak fully in the United States of America. With that note, hope everyone is safe and healthy.

Viva and I went to our first ACPA in 2019 Boston. Day two,  9:00 am-ish we were waiting along with 30 plus attendees in one room for a session about international students (can’t remember the exact topic). Two girls sitting across from us seemed a little stressed focusing on their laptop. As first-time convention attendee I reached out and introduced myself. “Hi, my name is Violet, a second year graduate student from Teachers College, Columbia University. What’s your name?” They looked up and introduced themselves and I learned that they were also graduate students and were preparing to present later that day. While I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact of graduate students presenting at annual national conventions, someone at the stage announced “due to some emergency that the presenters for this session are no longer able to attend, we apologize for the inconvenience.”

“What a bummer, there are already such a limited number of sessions on international students here, right now they canceled another one?” Viva stood up and started packing her tote.

I finished my last sip of coffee, grabbed my stuff and followed the crowd exiting the room, “Maybe, we could do it next year” I looked at Viva.

That thought in March 2019 led us to stand in front of other higher educators in March 2020 discussing ways to better support our international students through social media.

Both Viva and I have been international students for years before joining the field of U.S. higher education. We currently work as student affairs professionals with a large number of international students. Our international and millennial identities made us feel the obligations to discuss the importance of supporting international students through social media. In our presentation, we examined the conceptual framework of the acculturation process and social media. We analyzed two case studies on institutional effort in using social media to engage students. We then presented our findings in our qualitative interviews with 8 international students. Lastly, we shared six takeaways that our audience could incorporate in their daily practice.

Why do we need to care about international students? In the 2018-2019 academic year, there are more than 1 billion international students present in the United States of America. They contribute around 40 billion US dollars to the U.S. economy. In order to better support them through social media, it is important to understand the adjustment process and the concept of social media.

When international students come to the United States, their heritage culture (home culture) and host culture (American culture) will meet together, the process of adjusting in the new environment is defined as acculturation. The range of life changes that our students encounter are labeled as acculturative stressors. There are five main categories of acculturative stressors, language, eucational, sociocultural, discrimination and practical stressors. Researchers discovered that our international students utilize four different kinds of strategies in overcoming these stressors. Depending on how much they identify with their host culture and heritage culture, they would choose assimilation, seperation, isolation, or integration strategies. It is important to note that social support in general decreases the aforementioned acculturative stressors. As student affairs professionals living in the current world, technology is inevitable in our daily work. The foundation of social media is creating an online social network for individual usuals. Online communication and user generated information are two main characteristics of social media. By 2021 the number of social media users is expected to grow to over three billion. Many studies have explored the impact of social media on student engagement and student academic and social integration by looking at the american college students in general. There is a missing gap of how social media affects our international students population.

The two case studies that we presented are from first, the graduate admission office of the Fu foundation school of engineering and applied science, Columbia University and second, the international students affairs office at the Arizona State University. The Columbia admission office collaborated with the Chinese Students and Scholars Association in prospective students outreach for their annual China recruitment trip. Besides using student groups’ official wechat account they also asked current students who came from the universities that they are going to recruit to share the event information through their own social media accounts. The International Students Services office at Arizona State University runs an official wechat page to support their Chinese international students. The official page provides all-in-one services that include community announcement, student engagement, answering student inquiry and educating students about American Culture. The account is overseen by the program coordinator, they work closely with student volunteer writers and student workers to finalize the content that would be beneficial to the Chinese students population.

Both Viva and I understand that both case studies are looking from the Chinese students population perspectives. In order to get other international students’ point of views, we conducted eight qualitative interviews with students from China, India, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Each interview ranges from 40 minutes to 60 minutes. Our goals are to hear the voices of our international students, understand their experience of using social media and to better support their transition into the United States of America. Through our interview on their personal social media usage, their before and after studying abroad social media usage comparison and their feedbacks to institutional efforts, we concluded the following:

Combining conceptual frameworks,  case studies and students’ qualitative interviews, we concluded the following six takeaways that might be helpful for student affairs professionals daily practice in using social media to support the international student population.

Afterall, I hope this overview of our presentation will somewhat help you in your daily work. Also if you are passionate about one topic that you think might help other student affairs professionals work, please explore it and share your wisdom with all of us so that we can better support more and more students. Please feel free to reach out to me and Viva, our emails are listed below.

Viva Ye (Right): [email protected]

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About Violet Yin