Living With International Students

Roommate stories: some of the most fun and interesting antecdotes to carry you through your college years and beyond. Over the years I've accumulated my fair share of crazy roommate stories I'll treasure for the rest of my life. A particularly unique roommate experience for me can be traced back to my freshman year in 2015.

Following my acceptance to Pitt, like many students I joined the Pitt Class of 2019 Facebook page, eager to find a fun roommate to share my first year with. Luckily, I found 3 wonderful girls to room with, 2 of whom I still live with and are my best friends. The four of us applied for housing in a 4-person suite in Sutherland Hall, and we figured everything would be smooth sailing from there.

That July, we received our housing placements in the mail to find that the 4 of us had gotten exactly what we applied for. Yay! There was one catch, however. We also got placed with 4 other students in an 8-person suite. To our delight, the other 4 girls were international students from China.

Pitt celebrates diversity and inclusion, welcoming on average 920 international students each year. This makes up about 4.8% of the total undergraduate population. I think we all know Pitt is an exceptional university, so it's no surprise that a lot of international students choose to further their academic careers here. I love getting to meet so many people from different walks of life, so to be thrust so deeply into experiencing others' cultures, especially in my first year, was truly eye opening and exciting.

The girls' names were Wenyu, Xinyu, Jiali, and Donxiao. In efforts to immerse themselves in our culture, they each chose "American" names upon meeting us, going by Wenyu, Wendy, Ashley, and Kelly respectively. As time went by, we all got to know a lot about each other and the ways in which our cultures were similar and different. At times, the language barrier was quite difficult, but it's incredible what can be learned and appreciated when two parties make an equal effort to try to understand and appreciate one another for their differences.

To this day, we all will cross paths out and about on campus, and it's nice to see each other and catch up. While living with international students isn't an experience that everyone will get to have, it definitely is one that everyone should have, and I'm certainly thankful that I did.