Over the past two semesters, I have been more or less “reporting live on South Asia.”

The SMU campus is as international as it gets – students from all over the world are here, either as full time students or exchange students.

But the experience that an international student goes through in college can no doubt be sometimes entirely different from what a native student would have.

I had known absolutely no one in America when I decided to study here, except a few family friends I had heard about remotely. So I arrived in the U.S. dependent on the benevolence of American friends, whom I had of course, never met before. This definitely was an experience I wanted to pass on to the new international students who arrive on campus.

When I started this column, I wanted to show to the community at SMU a glimpse of the experience that an international student goes through. I had the intention of demystifying certain aspects of the Indian society like arranged marriages or the curious differences in the manner of addressing others. Along with that, I wanted to introduce such topics to someone new to South Asian and Indian culture. And through all this, I wanted to offer the perspective of someone who is looking at America from the outside in.

Being an international student is not easy: you leave behind almost everything and everyone you have known so far in your life and take one giant leap of faith for an education that would project you to the career of your dreams – back at home or anywhere in the world.

SMU’s international student assistance has to be one of the best in the country. Hand in hand with the International Student Services are the various efforts of The International Friendship Program and the efforts of the Chi Alpha Internationals; giving every international student the opportunity to intermingle and gel into the American society with ease.

Because of my background, I could often have the perspective of someone sitting on the fence with a good view of both sides of the ground. And more, since I am an engineering graduate student, I could keep things personal and less dogmatic: I shy away from any clinical analysis of my topics.

In the process, I discovered at SMU the rich intellectual body across various schools. From the responses I would get for my migration pieces to the various ingenuous opinions on my perspective, I discovered that am growing more and more proud of the university I am associated with.

I learned many things at SMU over my degree program. Apart from my academics, I learned about cultures and societies and how truly humanity in this world shares the same stage albeit in different costumes. One of the most important lessons was by the deep end of the swimming pool at the Dedman Center: where I finally overcame my fear of deep waters, and took a dive. As my feet left the floor and I was in mid air facing a lifetime’s phobia about to hit my face, I recognized the air I was slicing through. It was the same air my aircraft sliced through as I took off from India long ago when I flew to America. And yes- I never stopped swimming.

Sunil is a graduate student in the Lyle School of Engineering.