Questions to Ask International Students
Questions for getting to know an international student without treating them as a spokesperson for their country, covering how they arrived, what is different about the coursework, the practical difficulties, and what they plan to do next.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How long have you been here, and how did you end up at this school?
Why ask it
An easy opener that also tells you how much of the adjustment is behind them. Someone three weeks in needs different conversation, and different help, than someone in their third year.
What surprised you in your first week?
Why ask it
First-week surprises are usually concrete and often funny: portion sizes, how quiet a street is, how early shops close. It is a lighter question than asking about culture shock and gets better material.
Is your course structured differently from what you were used to?
Why ask it
Assessment styles differ enormously: seminar participation, open-book exams, coursework weighting, how much you are expected to argue with a lecturer. This is where able students most often struggle, and it rarely comes up socially.
Which everyday thing here took you longest to work out?
Why ask it
Bank accounts, phone contracts, doctor registration and public transport consume weeks. Asking about the mundane logistics is more useful than asking about culture, and you may be able to help with the answer.
What do people here get wrong about where you are from?
Why ask it
Lets them correct assumptions on their own terms rather than being asked to explain their country. The answer often says as much about your own place as theirs.
What do you eat when you want something that tastes like home?
Why ask it
More specific than asking about favourite dishes, and it usually produces something practical: a shop across town, a substitution that nearly works, a recipe their mother sends by voice note.
What is the hardest thing to do here that was easy at home?
Why ask it
Surfaces friction that is invisible to locals: getting a haircut, finding medication, being understood on the phone. These small blocked tasks accumulate into feeling foreign more than any big cultural gap does.
How often do you speak to people back home, and how bad is the time difference?
Why ask it
The mechanics matter. An eight-hour gap means every call happens at someone's inconvenient hour, which is why students in distant time zones often drift out of contact without meaning to.
What is the most useful thing another student did for you when you arrived?
Why ask it
Gives them a chance to talk about kindness rather than difficulty, and it tells you exactly what would help the next arrival. The answers are usually small and repeatable.
What do you do when you need to speak your own language for a while?
Why ask it
Operating all day in a second language is tiring in a way that is hard to describe to people who have not done it. Asking acknowledges the effort without making it a complaint.
How do you handle holidays that nobody here marks?
Why ask it
A festival that empties the streets at home passes unnoticed here, often during term. This is one of the sharpest moments of distance and one of the easiest for a friend to do something about.
What do you miss that you cannot get here at all?
Why ask it
The unavailable thing is more revealing than the general question. It is sometimes food, but often a place, a routine, a sibling, or weather, and the answer opens the conversation further.
Has anything about home looked different to you since you left?
Why ask it
Distance changes how people see where they came from, and this often produces the most reflective answer in the set: something they had assumed was universal and now see as local.
When people ask where you are from, what do you find yourself saying?
Why ask it
For students who have moved before, or whose family did, the honest answer is complicated. Asking how they answer, rather than where they are from, leaves room for that.
What has been the best day you have had here?
Why ask it
Balances the harder questions with a real memory, and tells you what they enjoy. If they cannot come up with one, that is worth noticing rather than pressing on.
Is there something here you have come to like that you did not expect to?
Why ask it
The answer is often oddly specific: rain, a bus route, a way of queueing. It also shows that adjustment involves acquiring things, not only losing them.
When someone says something ignorant, do you correct them or let it go?
Why ask it
Asks about their strategy rather than asking them to relive an incident. Most students have a policy, usually based on tiredness, and hearing it tells you what they want from you when it happens in front of you.
What is something you have got better at since moving that has nothing to do with your degree?
Why ask it
Moving countries alone builds unglamorous competence: paperwork, cooking, arguing with a landlord, being alone. Naming it lets them take credit for the part of this that never appears on a transcript.
Do you want to stay after you finish, and what does that depend on?
Why ask it
Plans usually hinge on things outside their control: visa rules, job offers, family. Asking what it depends on rather than what they want avoids treating a constrained decision as a free choice.
What would you tell someone from home who was thinking of coming here?
Why ask it
Ends by giving them the position of authority. The advice is usually blunter and more concrete than anything they have said about their own experience so far.
Getting to Know International Students
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to ask well
Ask about their life, not their country
"What is Nigeria like" puts someone in the position of a tour guide for two hundred million people. "What was your commute like at home" gets you a real answer and does not ask them to represent anyone.
Offer something practical rather than sympathy
If they mention a problem with a bank, a doctor or a form, the useful response is to say who you would ask. Sympathy about being far from home is easy to give and rarely what is needed.
Let the second language set the pace
Fluency drops when people are tired or the room is loud. Slowing down, dropping idioms and not finishing their sentences for them are more helpful than volume, and correcting grammar mid-conversation almost never is.
Where the good conversations tend to be
- Coursework differences: assessment style, how much argument is expected, how lecturers are addressed.
- Logistics: banking, healthcare, phone contracts, visas, and who they had to ask.
- Food they cook rather than food they miss, including what they substitute.
- Time zones and how they keep contact with people at home.
- What they have found here that they now like, which is where most of the surprises are.
What to avoid
Treating them as an explainer of a whole country
Politics, religion and conflict at home are legitimate topics between friends, but as an opening question they cast the student as a representative and put them on the defensive.
Complimenting their English as an achievement
Meant kindly, it lands as a reminder that they are being assessed as a foreigner. If you want to say something about how they speak, say that you enjoyed talking to them.
Turning every conversation toward homesickness
Being asked repeatedly whether you are coping is its own burden. Ask about the course, the city and their weekend as you would with anyone else, and let the harder subjects arrive when they choose.