Final report!!!

Problems that international pre-sessional students can have

Background
Moving to live in a new country‚ having a new culture‚ and containing a new academic system can be both interesting and difficult, by the other hand, transitions could be a real challenge when you are leaving without people who usually support and help you, that’s why student who move to live in a foreign country can have a lot of problems. In fact, moving to settle in London in order to study doesn’t seem as easy as we can imagine, at the same time; it’s very important to continue studying and trying to follow a higher level in the education in order to get a better job and to ensure the best future live. However, it would be beneficial to know what kind of problems international student can meet on heir first few weeks in London and it would be useful to learn more about what can they do in case of having problems and who can help them.

Aims
The purpose of this research consists on first finding out the main problems that international pre-sessional University students can have in their first few weeks, second, on seeing what they can do to solve those problems and if they are aware of who they need to speak to in order to get help. And a final aim which is seeing if students feel prepared for their new life in London.

Methods

The sample
The sample size was more or less 30 students following a pre-session course in Metropolitan University in order to improve their English and to learn more about how to study at the University.
All that students were from different nationalities, ages, and genders.

Data collection
The data collection was done by first preparing a questionnaire containing 10 questions then by asking about 5 peoples those questions in order to verify their efficiency, after that, some questions were corrected and made easier to understand.
The new questionnaire contains closed questions like yes or no one, question about what kind of problems students can have, who can help them and how they can cope with their new life.

Finding

Accommodation represents unsurprisingly the main problem that international students can have when they arrive in London; this is directly followed by the problem of the language which 25% of students suffer from. For this reason, we expected people to have trouble making friends. However, we concluded that this is also one of the problems that few respondents have (only 2 students)

In terms of less important problems that international pre-sessional students can have, coping with the food, the culture and opening a bank account are the less suffered from by the respondents. In fact, for European international students there is any problems with obtaining their visa, whereas, for the other nationalities (about 4 of them) it represents a small problem. (Figure i)

Problems that International students can have

(Figure i)

When it comes to who can help those respondents on solving their problems, over the half of them said that they go directly to their family. In fact, 20% of the students mentioned that they prefer to solve their problems by them selves and a bit less than that percentage cited that they can rely on the staff of the University, but, we also found one student who said that he goes to his embassy in order to get help. (Figure ii)

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Who can help them to solve there problems?

(Figure ii)

When asked if it’s necessary to have a part-time job or not, the majority of the international Pre-sessional students (80%) confirmed that it is. However, some other responds (3) don’t agree with that and said that they can live in London without working. After that, we tried to know what are the reasons that push the respondents to work, so, we asked them why do they need that part-time job, and according to their responses, we concluded that almost 90% of students believe that they need it principally in order to earn money (60%) or to ameliorate their financial situations (40%).

Discussion

By and large, international pre-sessional students come alone to study in London; this could be the main reason that makes the accommodation the first essential problem. In fact, when they come by them self, in general they don’t have where to live or they are not happy with the place where they live, for that, the majority of respondents suffer from this problem. These results suggest also that the second main problem is the language, which is very expected because all of the students are foreign and the English represents their second or third language. However, which is quite surprising with our findings is that there are students (even if there are few) who have problems with the food, and this is not really common in London because here we can find all kind of food.

It’s interesting to know that in case of problems the majority of students go directly to their families which normally are living far from their (on their native countries) this may to indicate that even the fact that students live far from them, they stay independent of their families. Furthermore, as the results mentioned, there is a small number among the international students who can rely on the University in case of problems which mean that maybe the University could ameliorate its services or maybe just aware students of what its staff can do for them.

As we also found on our findings, the majority of the respondents need a part-time job mainly in order to ameliorate their financial situation, this well suggests that life in London is expensive.