The best thing about being an international student is…..

They say nothing expands your mind like travel. International students, by their very definition, are living testimonies to that clichéd adage.

Nature, by its own nature, undeniably supports inter-mixing. As any serious student of biology can tell you, nature abhors words like endogamy, and punishes those specimens practicing it with genetically malformed progeny. Ask any student of anthropology, and he/she will tell you that words like xenophobia are quickly and painfully punished with words like holocaust. As such, nature has a built-in bias towards inter-mixing, inter-mingling, and co-existence.

As such, an international student is on a more natural path of life. That he/she has endeavoured to venture out of the security of home is commendable in itself; that he/she has done so to an international destination thousands of miles away from home and family, and to a society and culture probably vastly different from his/her own; and that he/she has done it at a young age, is a feat worthy of the highest commendation.

And what does this get us in return? Leaving aside the immediately tangible gains of an additional educational degree, this helps us plug into a global culture / thought process that is evident at cultural melting pots and global cultural hotspots like Sydney. This ultra-modern social undercurrent that flows around the world along its cultural arteries and veins, the mot evident manifestation of which is the Information Superhighway, and the fact that an international student is uniquely qualified to contribute to it from two different cultural standpoints, makes him/her one of the first candidates to cross-geographic, cross-boundary, trans-national, World Citizenship. It is this fringe benefit that uniquely makes an international student one of the first citizens of the fast-approaching Global Village, current governments, politics and their citizenry laws, which are anyways relics of an insular mindset of the old millennium and will not last long enough into the new one, be damned!

It is this expansion of consciousness that an international student brings to himself/herself, and it is exactly this hint of spice and tang that he/she brings to a sweet, but perhaps cloyingly so, host society, that makes this a blatantly true win-win situation for everyone involved!