“I left home for better opportunities elsewhere”: An Autoethnographic Study of what it means to be an International Student
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is increasingly receiving international students despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Informed by the media, friends and family members, many international students are motivated by the prospects of studying in Canadian post-secondary institutions. This is due to factors such as the reputation of education in Canada, scholarship opportunities, and future employment opportunities. Upon arrival, international students become aware of the challenges associated with living in a new country. They become disappointed and stressed, especially during the initial stage of settlement due to various challenges such as financial difficulties, discrimination and racism, environment-related challenges, loneliness and other mental health issues. Their challenging experiences affect their overall satisfaction and success in their studies. Given the cultural, social and economic benefits international students bring to Canada, it is essential to understand their experiences and how to better support them. In this study, I contributed to the existing literature by focusing on my past experiences as an international student from Ghana using evocative ethnography. I shared the challenges, successes and supports that shaped my overall perspective and settlement in Canada. The major challenges were financial problems, environmental and cultural adjustment, discrimination and loneliness, and COVID-19 pandemic-related challenges. Support strategies involved my personal motivation to succeed, institutional supports (i.e., scholarships, food bank, English language centres, international student centre), my peers in Canada, and my family in my home country. I hope that international students who intend to migrate to Canada and those presently in Canada will learn from the experiences that I have had. This is a singular narrative, but has the potential to influence migration decisions and policies to foster quality international students’ experiences in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".