First-year international students' perceived impact of the International Student Services office

Abstract

As international student attendance on college campuses in the US continues to increase in record numbers, International Student Services (ISS) offices across the country are tasked with providing services to aid the growing number and variety of sojourners in their transition to life on campus in the United States. This dissertation is a qualitative investigation into the relationship first-year international students from various regions of the world report having with the ISS office on a large, Midwestern, public university. In this dissertation, I explored how sojourners in their first year of study in the US perceived the impact the ISS office had on their educational experiences. This study aimed to explore these perceptions by interviewing nine international students at the beginning, middle, and end of their first year of study in the US, interviewing the Director of the ISS office, observing three international student events on campus, and analyzing documents produced by the ISS office. The study found that the sojourners were generally adventurous, social, and determined people who had a decreasing amount of contact with the ISS office over the course of the semester. The students reported that the ISS office had an impact on only a few areas of their overall experience in the US, but those areas (travel documents, orientation to the campus, and enrollment) were vital to having a positive experience in the US. The Director of the ISS office reported that their role was to coordinate in the background with entities across campus and the community to help sojourners adjust to campus life while maintaining the role of safety net for the students. The findings suggest that the ISS office had a much larger impact on the lives of sojourners than the students perceived. Given the positive experiences reported by each of the sojourners, the approach taken by the ISS office in this study appeared to work well on their campus.