Tag Archives: international students

International Students in Psychology: An Overlooked Group?

The number of international students enrolled in U.S. universities declined since the 2016/2017 academic year (Institute of International Education; IIE, 2019).  While data for the years 2019/2020 are yet to be released, there is no doubt that trend will continue to decline given the abrasive conditions that foreign students continue to experience in the U.S. With the addition of a pandemic, systemic racism and police brutality, and specific policies differentially targeting immigrants and immigration, international students’ concerns are currently exacerbated by substantial threats to the continuation of their academic journeys and ambitions.

International students in psychology have been uniquely impacted by the institutional changes in response to the syndemic.  Some of the direct effects to this population span across the areas of their immigration status, academic responsibilities, career opportunities, financial stability, safety, and mental health and wellbeing. Often these concerns are overlooked or not prioritized.  

International Status: The stringent immigration and visa regulations applicable to international students in psychology have compelled them to limit their experiences and access to opportunities. The current syndemic in the U.S. only exacerbates this system. Students are unable to renew their existing visas and/or obtain authorizations for further training, disrupting the sensitive timelines for foreign students and professionals to commence and/or complete training; it also interferes with their ability to remain within status thereby creating extreme worry about lawful presence and work in the U.S.

Academic Responsibilities:  Given the unsettling current presentation of COVID- 19 in the U.S., home governments have requested that certain populations return home.  While programs have offered online instruction to these students, the significant time differences between the U.S. and students’ home countries have made learning an arduous task and minimally satisfying. Additionally, the inability to be physically present interferes with international students accruing practicum hours to secure externships and internships. As such, international students may be severely hindered in their practical experiences and hour accumulation, ultimately being disfavored when applying for internships and externships.  

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What Keeps Me Going During COVID-19: Journey of an International Graduate Student

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all of us differently. While it’s not easy or fair to compare who was affected the most, staying away from home and family has been incredibly hard on international students. I have stayed indoors for the past three months and have experienced overwhelming emotions regarding personal loss and professional uncertainty.

Away from Home  

My home country India is fighting COVID in a manner that is very different from United States. I share this concern with many of my Indian friends that to be safe in India largely depends on the action of our own family members. The government machinery is under immense pressure and has not been able to respond to the rising public needs in the wake of the pandemic. Every day I would hear new challenges from my family back home – from grocery stores running out of basic food items to people unsuccessfully lining up for hours to get the government sanctioned ration; from overcrowded hospitals to healthcare workers getting infected in the absence of adequate Personal Protection Equipment (PPE). In this atmosphere, it’s unsettling and emotionally draining to imagine how my parents would manage if something were to happen to them. In times of crisis it is natural to stay with one’s family. Not knowing whether and when I would be able to see them again adds an additional layer of sadness and helplessness.

Losing Loved Ones

COVID19 has brought incessant personal losses for me. This has made me reflect on how I process the plethora of complex emotions that loss brings. It all started with my mother calling me one day to inform that my grandfather has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and only has a few days left. It is largely my mother who takes care of her father and her father in law. Every day, she would feed my paternal grandfather in the morning and then visit her father at the other end of the city in the afternoon. When a lockdown was announced, she had to stop this commute. It was painful to listen to a daughter’s grief of not being able to meet her dying father in his last few days.

At the same time, my husband lost both of his grandparents to health challenges in India. He had just moved to the Unites States and this news was a shock for him. I wasn’t sure what kind of support I could offer him. He clearly wanted to be back home with his family and mourn with them. Almost simultaneously, our close friend and flat mate, a Chilean, discovered that his mother fractured her leg from a fall and that his father has cancer. He rushed to book his flight home to Chile. It was bittersweet that he got to be with his father in his last days; he passed away after a week. It was not just humans, one of our dogs who I admired for her resilience throughout my life, also died during this time back in India.

Perhaps being so far away from home, we don’t feel the full force of our emotions when hearing about these tragic events. Maybe our bodies, in order to protect ourselves, grows a thick skin against such news. The only thing I look forward to now is our hopeful trip back to India in December. 

The plight of Migrants

Watching news every day from India hit a new low for me. As the lock-down was announced, an estimated number of 130 million migrant workers started to walk back to their villages from big cities like Delhi and Mumbai due to a of loss of work opportunities. They were travelling distances like 1,600 kilometers on foot, often dying due to hunger and/or heat as well as being subjected to immensely undignified measures at various stops like being sprayed with disinfectants by government officials after reaching Bareilly (a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh). There was also heartwarming news about how locals and nonprofits stepped up to provide food and shelter at many places. But the overwhelming response I saw from the state and fellow Indians indicated that these migrants don’t belong to the country. It broke my heart not just to read about their unwarranted struggles but also my own helplessness that I was unable to do much for them at this time.

Coming Home: The Funding Crisis in Academia

It is not unknown that many departments and universities are facing extremely difficult situations in terms of supporting their graduate students. While this affects all students, it affects some more than the others. International students often lack both financial as well as social safety nets that can be vital during these times. In many cases, not having money simply means stopping your research and going back home. I was fortunate to have been able to navigate this situation due to a supportive program and faculty at my university. But my conversations with friends and the larger international community have highlighted the extent of mental pressure international students felt during this time. Unlike others, they cannot move in with their parents if they don’t have the stipend to pay their rent. Overall, the cost of pursuing a PhD – a 5-year long journey – in another country comes at a huge price for many of us. So uncertain situations such as the current pandemic make us question whether it’s worth pursuing this direction at all.

Change in Research Directions

Right after the pandemic lock-down was announced and the universities physically shut their laboratories earlier this year, I was a part of a meeting between faculty and graduate students. Here, the primary question the graduate students were asked was – How do you think you would change your research direction now, given that the pandemic has rendered your earlier research plans unfeasible?

I was already grappling with understanding what had just happened when I felt a flurry of emotions run through me – helplessness, lack of support, and confusion. I didn’t have an answer to this question and I strongly wished this question was not asked in the meeting in such an unsympathetic manner. I felt two things: first, the entire onus has been put on me to find a new research direction almost making the pandemic my fault; and secondly, if I was not ready with the answer in this meeting, I was not working hard enough. I look up to the faculty as mentors – people who can problem solve with me and guide me through that process, not leave me stranded alone in midst of finding answers to research directions.

At this point some burning questions were raised for me: “What is the meaning of the work I am trying to do here? Or does it have any meaning at all?”

Down the road, when I look back on my life or when I think back on this time of crisis — will there be a respectable answer to the question: So what did you do at that point?

Personally, academic prowess means little if it doesn’t solve real life problems or help people in some way. One really questions the value of a PhD if it is stuck between the pandemic, lack of funding, migrants dying of heat and hunger, change in research directions and not being with family – something that has disturbed me immensely during this time.

What Kept/Keeps me going

Victor Frankl has talked about the importance of having a purpose in life that adds meaning to it. It is similar to the existentialist Buddhist philosophy that acknowledges that everything in this world is inherently meaningless and is never stable; one has to add meaning to objects, experiences and life itself. Both these sources have helped me survive and develop my own understanding around the pandemic and its impact. Frankl states that everything can be taken from a (wo)man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

For me, this was SwaTaleem, a nonprofit I co-founded. We work to enhance educational outcomes for young girls prone to early marriage. COVID-19 hit this community of girls in ways unimaginable for most of us. I can always come back to my research if there is a gap or disruption – it doesn’t mean the same thing for them. In communities where child marriages are high, disruption in education means never coming back to school; it means getting married. The residential schools where we work in, have been shut down and girls have been sent back home. Online education does not work in these settings. Even having a phone in a household doesn’t guarantee that a girl can access it. Being at home now, simply means a higher likelihood that the family will marry them off as a liability. In fact, a recent UN report suggests that COVID-19 will push 13 million more girls into child marriage.

The challenges that these girls face are much more serious than mine. In fact, if one looks closely at this community, they carry out negotiations each day fueled by resilience and resistance. What pride and joy it brings me to work for and with these girls. And it is simply this that has kept me going. Each day I get up, pausing my own ‘research’, and try to assemble some solutions for this complex social problem with equally committed and passionate people in India. It just gives a bigger meaning to my little pursuit of a degree, to the research I do, to the truth I seek and to my life. And I have realized that when you work for others, your problems seem small – always – and it somehow propels you to do better. Because there is a bigger driving force that makes you work harder.  

Getting Perspective

Building on the previous point, I want to highlight a larger angle on getting perspective in life. When I read the news on the migrants in India, the Amphan cyclone in South East Asia (strongest in a decade), the COVID-19 affected populations in Illinois around me (the majority of whom are Blacks and Latinas) and very recently, the collective resistance in the George Floyd case –  it humbles me. It gives me perspective as well as a deep sense of gratitude not just to what I have, but also to what some of my people all over the world are facing. I have food, shelter, work to do, a salary and a loving partner – this has been more than enough for me to sail through with empathy.

Support Systems

I have stayed away from my partner, now husband, for 1.5 years before he moved to the US earlier this year. During the pandemic, we were together, and it was truly a blessing. We also had a close friend of ours who stayed with us during the pandemic. Having this support system in place made so many things lighter for us to absorb as a collective. Sharing meals and conversations brought us closer but also lessened the daily impact of what each one of us was going through. Also, its encouraging how some of the faculty have taken active roles and stepped up to work in collaboration during this time to create an environment of support for us.

Hope

I will end with Hope – one of the most important qualities that keeps us going through the darkest times in our lives and what it means to me as an Indian international graduate student. 

I always think of the time when one day, soon enough,

I will be able to go back to India and breathe its air and listen to the chaos on the roads;

That I will be able to eat Chaat and Samosa and Masala Dosa;

That I will be able to see the girls back in school and ask how school is going and what they want to be in life?

That I will be able to meet and talk to the teachers on cold sunny mornings in Haryana about what we can improve in our program;

That I will be able to discuss program strategies with the team members while planning what to cook together in the evening (yes that’s how work happens in remote areas);

That I will be able to see and touch and play with my dogs and hug them like I want to now;

That I’ll be able to cycle on the busy roads of my hometown and have Chai with my mother in the evenings.

Our life gives us few chances where we can truly change what we believe in and what we do. Maybe this is one such chance and this ‘Hope’ can help us choose the right path.


Ananya Tiwari is a doctoral student in educational psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the Program Coordinator for the Graduate Evaluation Diversity Internship (GEDI) program with the American Evaluation Association (AEA). She uses developmental psychology to study socio-emotional (SE) skills at the intersection of poverty and gender. Her focus areas are cross cultural measurements of SE skills, programme design, and evaluation using culturally responsive frameworks. Ananya is also the co-founder of the SwaTaleem Foundation that works with rural adolescent girls in India to enhance the educational outcomes through SE skills and human-centered design.

International Students & Internship: Thoughts from Training Directors

It’s that time of year again…the beginning of internship applications! This is certainly a stressful time in the life of many psychology graduate students, however, internship applications can be particularly tricky for international students who have additional residency and visa issues to navigate. The American Psychological Association of Graduate Students is excited to release the second video in our series on international students applying for internship. As a complement to our first video featuring international students navigating the internship process, this video highlights the perspectives of training directors. We interviewed five training directors to learn about their experiences with international students on internship.

Here are a couple key themes that came up across our interviews:

  • Institutional support can go a long way: Interviewees that had resources at their training site (i.e., international student services, an HR department familiar with international hiring processes, attorneys on staff) felt better able to navigate the visa process with their interns. By contrast, training directors at smaller sites without international hires, commented on feeling lost during the visa process in particular. For training directors in this position, there seemed to be a dearth of centralized resources available. Interviewees suggested the development of specific resources such as a “living document” with current information on the necessary steps for the internship match, that could be shared in CCTCP, and for the development of a liaison through APPIC.
  • International students benefit clients, staff, and the training site: All interviewees commented on the incredible value that international students can add to a training site. Training directors noted a number of skills, such as language abilities, specific cultural competencies, and the opportunity for other trainees and psychologists to learn from the diverse perspectives of the international student interns. Essentially, training directors reflected that once they were able to get their international interns up and running at their site, the benefits of bringing in an international applicant outweighed the difficulties of getting them in the door.

What are your thoughts? Do you have resources you want to share for training directors or international students navigating internship? We want to hear from you in the comments!

Check out the first video in this series!

International Students as Teaching Assistants: Barriers and Suggestions

MPj04383850000[1]One of the biggest difficulties faced by international students is getting the necessary funding to pursue a graduate degree in psychology. After all the struggles of applying – getting the GRE, TOEFL, letters of recommendation, and personal statements – you’ll likely want a site that will fund you, especially given international students are not typically eligible for financial assistance or loans in the United States.

This can put some international students in a conundrum – between what they are able to do, what they would like to do, and what the department would like them to do. Most international students would like to have a well-rounded experience, developing their practical, teaching, and research skills. At the same time, they are not usually able to work outside of their department, and cannot be funded by federal grants. This leads international students to find departmental funding – which mostly means being a TA.

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International Students and Clinical Work: Overcoming Challenges

MPj04383850000[1]As a part of their graduate coursework, all students in the applied psychology fields (clinical, counseling, and school psychology) are required to obtain clinical training. International students in these graduate programs often experience unique challenges in their training to become mental health professionals. In addition to problems typically experienced by their domestic counterparts, they face unique challenges such as adjusting to a new culture and, for many, learning to conduct therapy in a new language (Mittal & Wieling, 2006). These language and cultural barriers affect more than just the academic, counseling, and supervision experiences of these trainees; they take a toll on stress-levels, health, and well-being (Nilsson, 2007).

Although international students face several challenges on their clinical work when compared to U.S.-domestic counterparts, they can provide a unique perspective that might help them provide more culturally sensitive counseling. It is important to look at ways in which international trainees can be supported in developing their clinical skills and address their own needs and concerns. Here are some ways that international students can overcome challenges in clinical work:

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