Every Australian in Cambridge has had problems with their pants and their thongs. This is not a case of your everyday wardrobe malfunction: our problem stems from a confusion of terms, since English “trousers” are known as “pants” and “flip-flops” are what we call “thongs”. It can be embarrassing and confusing: try exclaiming “Oh no, my thong just snapped!” in a public place and see what happens.

Being an international student in Cambridge brings a variety of challenges, and the accidental discussion of G-strings is just the tip of the cultural iceberg. Some aspects of being a foreigner are trivial and hilarious, such as the need to adapt to British pies and bangers and mash, whilst also wrapping up for wet and bitter winters.

However, there certainly can be a greater sense of change and alienation for those from overseas, and the notion of a culture clash does shape many international students’ experiences of the university. The first thing to realise is that there is no single ‘international experience’. In 2010-11, 6,095 international students attended the University of Cambridge, forming roughly 30% of the student body. With so many internationals, how can there be one single uniform experience? Every individual reacts differently to new environments.

The fact that the Cambridge student body is drawn from such a diverse range of backgrounds makes this especially true. For instance, the experience of someone from somewhere like Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the United States, might be very different from that of a student from an Asian or Middle Eastern country. Those experiences can be different again from someone who has attended an English-style international school in their home country, or studied for their A-Levels at an English high school.

Jinho Clement is from Sabah, one of two Malaysian states in the island of Borneo. The son of a Malaysian-born Indian and an American-raised Korean, he can drive ten minutes from his house, launch a speedboat from the jetty and reach a nearby archipelago in a quarter of an hour. He may not have set his sights on Cambridge from an early age, but his sixth form boarding school in peninsular Malaysia had a big emphasis on Oxbridge and encouraged him to try. Alisa Matjuka left Latvia to study for her A-Levels at an English international school, partly to avoid the possible prejudice against hiring ethnic Russians.

Or take the network of Australians and Kiwis: outstanding students are increasingly leaving at graduate or even undergraduate level as their universities lack the academic standing of Oxbridge and the Ivy League. It would be wrong to say that your country and schooling decides who your friends are; however, it does mean that the academic and social culture I’ve been exposed to as an Australian is recognisable to English students. Friendships are built on conversations, and conversations are built on jokes, anecdotes and allusions. In order to participate and have something interesting to say, you need knowledge of the group’s underlying shared assumptions.

According to Clement, chair of CUSU’s International Students Committee: “British culture is very rich, very sophisticated, and a massive part of it is about subtly drawing upon this wealth in everyday situations. This makes the humour, wit and conversations a lot more interesting, but it also means that those unfamiliar with these nuances feel like they’re missing out on an inside joke. I think the Olympics Opening Ceremony epitomises this notion quite well. I wouldn’t say that anyone is at fault for this: the apparent impenetrability is just a function of the culture’s complexity.”

The obvious cultural resemblance between England and countries like Australia disguise their subtle differences with English culture: less of a culture clash than a growing culture itch. The stereotype of the stiff, reserved English is vastly less accurate for younger generations – however, many Australians report that English students are less automatically open to starting a conversation with a new person, and are often surprised by the habit of friendly mockery which prevails in Australian chatter.

This is a common feeling among international students; Clement comments that “one thing I had to pick up quickly was getting to grips with the more ‘reserved’ nature of Brits. While people back home were a lot more expressively warm, over here people tend to fear going over the top or being too intruding in casual settings. I had to adjust to this and occasionally remind myself of the difference between being reserved and not-caring”.
Amelia Rowan, a second-year social anthropologist, grew up in Tanzania and attended boarding school in England for two years. She was struck by the expectation of having “a private and public face”, and remembers feeling that she had to learn to keep back her opinions and feelings until she knew people better.

The twin issues of the language barrier and a slight ‘standoffishness’ contribute to what many office holders in student organisations see as the biggest problem for international students: integration. Alisa Matjuka, Trinity College’s Overseas Welfare Officer, sees her role as existing to deal with the problems of entry which often emerge early on in the first term. While everyone at Cambridge is academically talented, she records that many international students (especially those whose subjects may not require high-level fluency in English) find that Cambridge is “not the easiest place to socialise for non-native speakers”.

Unfortunately, the worst of the language difficulties coincide with the time when friendship groups are forming, which can mean that people end up socialising only with students from their own country or other internationals. Of course, as Clement says “while this isn’t bad in itself, a concern is that this is happening despite [international students] wishing otherwise”.

Matjuka also believes that students from societies with less liberal social and political norms can have more trouble than others, in that their views can distance them from people brought up in a democratic, liberal country. Certainly, many students find elements like Britain’s sex and dating culture bizarre. “Who talks about who they accidentally slept with last night?” one student exclaims, whilst others emphasise the general awkwardness which pervades the English approach to relationships.

Then there is the binge drinking: a common point of difference to cultures where alcohol is drunk moderately or not at all during social occasions. Jinho Clement contrasts Malaysian night life with English: “Back home we have ‘mamak stalls’ and coffee shops which open all night, so it was a big part of life to just hang out for a midnight snack under the stars by the roadside. Over here most shops close by sunset, so evening options seemed to be limited to pricey sit-down meals, takeaways, kebab in the cold, or something alcohol-related. Not being a fan of drinking, I faced the ultimatum of compromising or becoming really creative with evening activities.”

Can we find a way to summarise “the international experience”? Well, basically, no, we can’t. The problem is that as soon as you start to generalise, you start to be wrong – you begin excluding some individuals’ unique experiences. However, there are some semi-eternal truths. As Clement says: “if we observe things from a sufficiently high level of abstraction they boil down to the same themes: fitting in, discovering self-identity and missing home”.