Javier Rodríguez Blog Assignment #3

"Stereotypes are stumbling blocks for communicators because they interfere with objective viewing of stimuli". As the article, "Intercultural Communication stumbling blocks", states that people tend to build conceptions about people based on their first impressions. When I decide to come to Binghamton University I didn’t realize that relationships with other people, “American people” had to be as hard that it is. Is interesting how this people thought that international students are segregating themselves and they are not making any friends outside their cultural and ethnic circles. However, as an international student and also as a minority I experienced many incidents at Binghamton. Last year when I first came to the graduate geography department I get in contact with quite a few students there that also speak my native language. That was a surprise for me because I didn’t know that these students were there. As its normal I get in contact with these people and I establish better relation with these classmates, obviously because they could understand me better because of language connections. However, other students took this as an insult and we were segregated for our own classmates. I don’t even know how these people can say that we segregate ourselves there. It’s easy to say that international students segregated themselves that in truth we are not very welcome. When I was taking statistics last semester I was getting many problems understanding math terminology because of the complexity of vocabulary and differences in meaning. On the other hand, in order to complete that course we were using computer software to interpret and evaluate data information. Also, our stats professor divided the class into few groups. That was very unpleasant to me because we were getting problems of communication between the Spanish speakers and native English speakers. When I was reading Hongchul blog I recall this success, which its quiet different but still related. When we were doing our teamwork investigation they obviously assumed the lid and no one ask me to do nothing. I felt very unwelcome in that group because they were doing the work and they even ask me if I was available to contribute with them. As a result, they were getting problems with the software assigned to evaluate the data and I asked to them if they want me to help them with the program. They said: “did you know how to use it, because we believe that you cannot understand any of this”. I really don’t pay attention to that comment and I did run the necessary test and made up the conclusions necessary. It was very unpleasant to me to get in contact with people that do not know how to handle presence of different culture and ethnic population surrounding them. But at the end that help us to integrate us as classmates and nowadays, we establish better relations and at least we can say hi. Therefore, language and many other are stumbling block which makes people to segregate. Language can be a problem but I believe that beyond these issues as international students we tend to establish communication with people who speaks our native language or at least share similarities in culture. That doesn’t mean that international students are unfriendly, maybe we just feel better with people who understand and are getting into the same problems.