[Scrap] Students' rights at the University of Maryland, college park

Before starting this story, I would like you to let you know that I am not a Native American and my mother’s language is not English. It means my English is not perfect. Please keep in mind this.

I am a graduate student at the University of Maryland. These days, the Graduate Assistant Advisory Committee (GAAC) has sent several emails to investigate and survey the working and studying environments. I think they want to figure out some issues among the graduate students with their advisors and improve the quality of their life.

Is this working for the international student who is not good at English? People can think that how the graduate students studying in the U.S. cannot be good at English. However, unfortunately, it is real. There are really many international students on the campus, and many of them are not good at English. 

The university cannot have any chance to listen to those student’s opinions and minds. Why? Most of them really struggle for their life, not a study. Their future is the really unstable situation. Most of them abandon many benefits and promising future from their countries to study here. There is not an alternative for the future if they fail to graduate or lose their position now. They really don’t want to make any trouble in their campus life and just want to study and graduate for their next step. This is one of the reasons they cannot be louder and have a big voice in those situations.

Furthermore, they do not have enough confidence to have their voice in this society because of their English abilities. Most of the opinions, which the university can listen, are from the Native American in the campus. It is a real bias to understand the situations and issues.

Lastly, bad advisors push and blame them every day, and they lose their confidence every time. This is a vicious circle. The bad advisors lock their international students in their lab and keep watching them. They deal with the American students with the American mind, but not for the international students. There is not any university and campus rule in there. Such labs are working with their own rule. See any lab there are only Asian people or the others. Think about that why there is no American student in the lab.