Studying in a foreign country sounds glamorous, exciting and fun. It’s also serious business. Living in a new environment challenges most people, and students are no exception. The glamour wears thin, and the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know. As the comfort level decreases, uncertainty rises. Excitement may mask the free fall for a while, but you eventually hit the bottom. You experience culture shock. 

Stacie Berdan

Culture shock is confusion, disorientation and emotional upheaval that results from finding yourself immersed in a new culture. Its three-phased cycle consists of:  

1. The initial honeymoon. Everything is grand!
2. Fabulous turns to frustration, depression and confusion. This phase is often triggered by an event involving a  cultural difference, even a minor one.
3. Recovery. In this phase the crinkles are smoothed, and a wiser you moves on.  

Culture shock is inevitable and does not discriminate. You must experience it to understand it.  Individual coping mechanisms vary. Yet hundreds of thousands of students abroad every year. How do they cope?            

Students can borrow a page from the notebook of professionals trained by Terry Brake, cross-cultural expert and president of the Americas division of TMA World. “The ability to understand other cultures is an ongoing and continuously developing process,” he says. He offers the following cross-cultural principles to work, study and live by:  

• Relate to an individual, not a ‘culture.’
• Assume differences until similarity is proven.
• Work with a culture rather than against it.
• Ask “What do I need to understand?” not “What should I do?”
• Listen, observe, think and then talk.
• Focus on creating value out of differences rather than simply trying to avoid mistakes.
• Never try to ‘go native.’