Jimin Kang '21 presents her certificate project, "What About the International Students?," during the Program in Journalism's third annual Senior Colloquium.
Each year, over a million international students leave their home countries for the U.S. to be educated in American schools. When the coronavirus pandemic swept the nation in the spring of 2020, these students were hit especially hard: facing travel restrictions, consulate closures and classes taken from opposite time zones, they were forced to reckon not only with unforeseen bureaucracy, but questions of whether it was worth leaving home in the first place. For this project, I followed five international students across multiple countries and class years as they navigated the post-COVID landscape of higher education in the U.S. Told through a mix of reported and first-person writing, it offers an intimate glimpse into the lives of the nation's foreign students in a turbulent social and political time. The piece, originally reported and published in The Nation in June 2020, has been extended to include recent updates from April 2021.
