International students have long been admired by many Happy Valley residents for their courage. Who else has navigated so many cultural obstacles, educational challenges, financial demands and language barriers in order to attend Penn State? Who else has overcome so many fears of the known and the unknown?
This year, things got even tougher for such brilliant people from faraway places. New policies and procedures out of Washington, D.C. forced international students to list their social media sites before they scheduled visa interviews. Then, in order to provide time to vet their posts, the State Department paused all student visa interviews from May 27 to June 18. Wow, more than three weeks and at a critical time.
According to a letter from dozens of higher education leaders to the State Department, as reported on June 3 by Inside Higher Ed, the 23-day shutdown in visa interviews “sends a message that our nation no longer welcomes talented students and scholars from other countries.” However, many of the students who had chosen Penn State refused to be deterred and arrived on campus last week.
Each year since 2017, I’ve produced a column for StateCollege.com about incoming students from other lands, but never was the context so dramatic. This year, I interviewed 22 new international students, and they demonstrated strength of character in explaining why and how they got here. Only when I asked them, “Who is James Franklin?” did they struggle.
THE VIEW FROM THE TOP
Before talking to this fall’s new arrivals, I first interviewed Jody Pritt, Penn State’s assistant vice provost for international student and scholar advising. I asked her not only about the hurdles faced by new international students but also about how the university has helped them.
“This year,” she said, “I think we’ve doubled down on being present for them and being available to answer questions. We know that things might have been more stressful than they would have been previously. So we’ve tried to make them feel welcome and make them feel seen.”
Knowing that incoming Chinese students may have felt an extra measure of anxiety, I asked Pritt to describe the university’s “Global Gateway” orientation events in Beijing and Shanghai.
“We were prepared for conversations that were fear-based,” she said of the June gatherings, “but that is not what we got. No matter what, students still want the opportunity to come and study. Someone who says, ‘I want to leave home and go really far away from everything I know—including my loved ones—to study is already a motivated person. So it’s kind of like, OK, here’s another obstacle. We’re going to get through it.’
Pritt expects the new international students of 2025 to fare well at Penn State. “I think resilience, persistence and perseverance is what we’re going to see out of this group. They were motivated to get here, and they’re going to make it happen.”
“ANXIETY INDUCING”
For Gyan Patel, an Indian freshman in mechanical engineering, the process of coming to Penn State started in August of 2024. “The biggest barrier,” he said, “was the visa process.” Referring to the time when he took his visa interview, he called it “the most nerve-wracking day of my life ever.”
Patel’s words about the visa process carried no malice, however. “I’m not particularly against that,” he said, “because, at the end of the day, it is your country. It is your resources to be used; it is not another country’s resources. So I have that soft spot that it’s OK.’
Patel noted that Penn State’s good name helped sway visa interviewers to respond positively. “Penn State has a very good reputation,” he said. “For me and all my friends (also going to PSU), they said, ‘Oh, you’re going to Penn State. That’s nice.’ And then they approved us.”
Argyrios Patikos is a new Ph.D. student in electrical engineering who hails from Athens, Greece. He told me that “the whole process was difficult, anxiety inducing,” but the visa portion was the worst. According to Patikos, changes in federal funding and various policies caused universities like Penn State to send admission letters much later than usual. In his case, he had just a week to accept Penn State’s offer, “and then came the visa issues, which also took way too long.”
By the time Patikos got his visa, it was the beginning of August, and he needed to arrive in State College by mid-August. “It was a bit hard,” he noted, “but at the end of the day, I got here.”
TRAVEL TENSIONS
New students Bayan Orynbassarova, from Kazakhstan, and Ona Baasansuren, from Mongolia, have little in common apart from their long last names and their short history in State College. But Bayan, a new master’s degree student in biomedical engineering, and Ona, a freshman in statistics, do share one striking parallel. Both had harrowing arrivals in Happy Valley and were aided by local Good Samaritans.
I first spoke to Bayan outside the Hetzel Union Building on her third day at Penn State. “When I came here on the night of August 18,” she said, “I went to check into the dormitory but I couldn’t. I didn’t have a key. So I thought, ‘I don’t know anyone. Maybe I’ll sleep outside.’
“But I met Bridget, a junior student, and I met her parents and told them my story. They called the office for emergencies, but nothing happened. So I went to Bridget’s house that night…she’s from State College. So I didn’t sleep outside. I’m really appreciative of that.”
Just a few minutes after talking to Bayan, I met Ona just inside the HUB and heard a parallel account from her. Yes, trauma is a frequent condition for newly-arrived international students.
“When I got to the airport here,” she began, “they said my luggage was delayed—my suitcases were in Chicago while I was in State College. And my phone was dead so I couldn’t call an Uber to get to the university. I had traveled here for more than 40 hours from Mongolia, so I was tired and I wanted to get to my dorm. This was my first time in the U.S. and I had high expectations about this country, but now I was disappointed.
“So I went outside the airport and asked a random person, ‘Are you going to Penn State? Can you give me a ride?’ She was a sophomore and she was with her dad, and they gave me a ride. They were so worried for me that the dad offered to take me to the store to buy some things, and they asked me if I was hungry. Those kind of people surprised me and my mood changed.”
WHY PENN STATE?
I’m one of those State College townies who hardly thought twice about what college to attend. Raised in College Heights a mere half mile from campus, I readily yielded to family loyalties and the economics that screamed, “Penn State!” Thus, I’m curious about why other individuals fly halfway around the world to matriculate here.
My new Greek friend, Argyrios, said his decision to choose Penn State stemmed from the school’s research excellence in his branch of electrical engineering.
“I do high frequency microelectronics,” he told me, “and the research team that is here is tops. This is one of the few places in the world that has equipment to measure at high frequencies. So the work that is done here is excellent, and to be able to work on systems that are at hundreds of gigahertz is very exciting.”
Hieu Nguyen, a doctoral student from Vietnam, was also motivated by our university’s research strength. “Penn State has a very strong computer science department,” he said. “Their research lab aligned with my interests—coding and artificial intelligence.”
Meanwhile, a new student from Uzbekistan, Gulrukhsorabegim Abdusaidoua, was offered admission for a master of law degree by Penn State Law and also by Boston University and several U.K. institutions. Although the LLM program here is highly respected, other factors like health and finance helped tip the scales toward Penn State.
Regarding her health, “Guli” said that the polluted air in her nation’s capital, Tashkent, triggered her allergies to the point where she struggled to sleep at night. Thus, State College’s clean air was attractive to her and, she added, “State College is beautiful as I saw it on the Internet.” Concerning her finances, a year of law school tuition would have been prohibitive, but she said, “I’m really grateful for Pennsylvania State University providing me with a scholarship that covers most of my tuition fee.”
“WHO IS JAMES FRANKLIN?”
Each year, I make it a practice to ask international students if they have heard of James Franklin. As is usually the case, no one could tell me who he is or what he does, and that reminds me there is a big ol’ world out there beyond our local cocoon of Penn State football.
I didn’t query all of my 22 interviewees with the James question, but I did ask 16 of them. The closest to being correct was Mohammed, a freshman from Saudi Arabia. “Let me think about it,” said the new arrival. “He’s either working in a sports company like the NBA or he’s a football team coach maybe, or he’s with a financial company.”
As for responses that gave me a chuckle, an Indian student named Suyash Kale offered this educated guess: “Is he an alumni? I think there’s a building named after him at Penn State.” And then I couldn’t help but marvel that two students guessed that James Franklin was a former president of the United States and two others mentioned a possible link to Franklin Delano Roosevelt as they tried to audibly work out the answer. (Yes, these bright foreigners knew FDR’s middle name.) Well, Coach Franklin, if you need help in staying humble, just note that you lost the “James Poll” again, and the winner was a president who’s been dead for 80 years.
MARVELOUSLY MOTIVATED
You might not think Vatsal Sikarwar would be a likely candidate for selection as the “Most Likely to Succeed” member of Penn State’s Class of 2029. After all, he doesn’t come from a wealthy family in India, so he would struggle to convince a U.S. visa interviewer that he has the means to afford a U.S. education.
But Vatsal was incredibly impressive to me. That’s because he has qualities that transcend money. Like ambition. Entrepreneurship. And a strong work ethic.
As he neared his 2024 high school graduation in Hazaribagh, India, Vatsal aimed high and applied to such prominent U.S. universities as NYU, MIT and various Ivy League schools. And while filling out his CSS Profile with the College Board, he asked for 100% scholarship assistance. But despite doing laboratory internships at several Indian universities, he shouldn’t have been surprised that none of his target schools offered admission.
Vatsal then took a gap year and did additional internships to expand his knowledge and his resume in biomedical engineering. By the time he finished that year, he could list internships with five institutions—each lasting from two months to one year. And he could note that he had recruited and trained other Indian students to form a team of laboratory volunteers to tackle projects like the development of a prosthetic limb.
Although Vatsal’s loan requests were denied by Indian banks, his father sold some assets, liquidated his savings and got loans from relatives and friends. This capital, along with an acceptance by Penn State, paved the way for Vatsal to study in the U.S.
But one hurdle remained: his visa interview. “We had to show our (his father’s) income tax return, and the man was shocked that my father had only this much income. He took about seven minutes, a very long time for a visa interview in India because so many people are in the queue. But he checked our documents and he fetched some of the professors (from the internships) online. He was finally convinced.”
And so this marvelously motivated young man has come to Penn State. Although it’s impossible to predict the future, I’d say that good things lie ahead for Vatsal Sikarwar. Even though he couldn’t tell me anything about a person named James Franklin.
