Field Research II

International Students and their struggle with communication

After taking a step back, we sat together to discuss what exactly interested us when it came to the term communication. This is where Ju's situation as an international student came to light: as she does not speak nor understand (Swiss) German she finds it difficult to reach out to others which often caused loneliness. She is aware of the fact that communication is the key to her situation and therefore wanted to look into the thematic. Her story instantly intrigued us others so we decided to focus on our next field research on international student within the ZHdK.

Interviews

For our second part of our field research we wanted to interview a handful of different international students and ask them about their communication experiences within the ZHdK. We managed to contact several students and organise four meetings for the Tuesday. We also interviewed Ju, as she had inspired us to go in this direction and had some really interesting opinions about the subject.

Adri (Hungary)

Nick (Ireland)

Daria (Germany)

 Young Long (South Korea)

Ju-Young (South Korea)

Coconuts and Peaches

One of the most interesting interviews was with Nick from Ireland. He gave us an interesting perspective on why international students struggle with connecting with Swiss locals. He mentions the coconut and peach cultures. Switzerland shares a coconut culture which means that they are rather difficult to get to know at the beginning, however, once the "hard shell" is breached, they are very open and friendly.

"So there are some countries where people are coconuts, like in Switzerland, where it's quite hard to get past the outer shell. But when you get past it, people are very open and quite warm. And then Irish people are peaches. It's really easy to get into a conversation with an Irish person but if you ever want to talk about something really personal, it is almost impossible."

This comment pretty much sums up the behaviour of Swiss people and illustrated the difficulties international students have to face, when coming to Switzerland.

Documentation

A collection of documentation photos of our interview process: