Julia Kirst - What the United States Wants: The Essential Roadmap for International Candidates Applying for Study, Work, and Visa Opportunities

What the United States Wants:
The Essential Roadmap for International Candidates Applying
for Study, Work and Visa Opportunities

Copyright 2022 Jlia Kirst, Ph.D.

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Cover and Interior Design: David Provolo
Editing and Proofreading: Sophia Nelson

Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN): 2021923434

ISBN: 979-8-9852791-0-8 (print)
ISBN: 979-8-9852791-7-7 (e-book)

Published and printed in the United States

First Edition

For Anna Mae Patterson

When I arrived in the United States from Brazil a few decades ago, my first home in this then-foreign country was the Hospitality House. Through a series of extraordinary circumstances, I landed in Minnesota midwinter in what was supposed to be a short stay to improve my English.

It was at the Hospitality House that I began learning the ins and outs of this country, all with a most wonderful guide, Anna Mae Patterson, to whom this book is dedicated.

She was the one who patiently convinced me I should not wait for a bus to take me to my English classes in the minus 20-degree Fahrenheit weather because that kind of cold was dangerous. At first I resisted, for I was a 19-year-old keen on being independent. But when the kid from Saudi Arabia showed up to the first day of class with dark areas around his knuckles, I knew she wasnt kidding. The spots on my classmates hands were frostbite! The skin damage had occurred the day before when he carried his suitcasewithout glovesfor the short distance between the taxi and his dormitory entrance. That moment was just the first of many times I had to admit I knew very little about the United States.

There were delightful surprises, too. Anna Maes neighborhood had a diner, which I didnt know then is just another name for a small and simple American restaurant often located in a kind of trailer. There, I tried my first malted milkshake. I couldnt believe my tastebuds!

In Anna Maes pantry, I discovered the first bag of tortilla chips of my life and ate it all in one sitting. As they say here, I thought I had died and gone to heaven! But I hadnt bought the chips myself, so I delighted in their taste and worried about where I would find more to replace the bag. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that this delicacy could be found just about anywhere food was sold!

Such unexpected delights are one of the great pleasures of traveling and venturing into new worlds, arent they?

In those first days in the United States, I discovered that my English skills were less advanced than I had thought. (Isnt that so true for most of us?) And that put me in some funny situations, especially when I left the safety of Anna Maes house and started to take English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at a local university.

In my first few days in the ESL program, I brought my own lunch to class. After all, who knew how I would fare ordering food with my broken English? Near the end of the first week of classes, I felt a bit more adventurous and went to the main road along the university campus to see if I could find something to eat. Everything was new, including the look of the buildingswhich now sounds like a strange thing to say. I remember distinctly having a hard time identifying places and landmarks, as if my brain had to revise the very meaning of landmark.

That early afternoon, as I wandered down the street near the campus, I spotted a sign on a window that said FOOD. Looked promising. There was another word in front of food but I paid little attention because I didnt know what it meant. I opened the restaurants door with some nervousness: Would my English be good enough to order a sandwich? How would I manage all the questions they would inevitably ask about bread options, cheese options, and veggie options? I also felt mildly annoyed knowing that I would need to satiate my hunger with a measly sandwich. My Brazilian stomach was used to having a nice hot meal in the middle of the day.

I walked into what I thought was a restaurant and quickly learned the meaning of the word before FOOD. PET FOOD! Enormous bags of dry cat and dog food covered the floor! Embarrassed, I turned around and headed out the door.

Language mistakes such as these are easy to spot and laugh about, if not at the time they happen, then in the future. In our family, thirty years later, we still laugh about the mistake made by my childrens father, an American, when he came to Brazil for the first time. It was a hot day, and we stopped at a popsicle stand to refresh ourselves. Trying out his newly acquired Portuguese skills, he asked for a coc popsicle. All the Brazilians within earshot laughed heartily, while he wondered what had happened. Coco, with the stress on the first syllable, means coconut. That was, of course, the flavor he wanted. Instead, he asked for coc. The word, when the last syllable is stressed, means excrement. Once he realized what had happened, he laughed with us, and all was well.

Unlike language slips, cultural mistakes are much harder to explain and laugh off. Misinterpretations about what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior can have negative consequences, sometimes with lasting effects. Imagine, for example, that you are a newcomer to a country and, when you meet someone for the first time, you reach to give that person a hug. Now, lets imagine that in this country this sort of intimacy is reserved for married couples. There wont be easy laughs in response. There will be discomfort, and possibly someone wondering about what you meant with that hug: Did he just not know, or did he do it on purpose? How could she not have known? Did she just pretend she didnt know? And so on and so forth.

This book is about those situations where cultural illiteracy is less funny and more consequential. More specifically, it is about situations when golden opportunities, such as a seat at a competitive university program or a dream job at a prestigious company, are at stake.

I wrote this book to help you understand the values that most of the people of the United States live by but would be hard-pressed to describe if asked. Learning about these values would normally just be a matter of curiosity. But for you, it is rather important knowledge to have.

• When you apply for an opportunity to study, work, or get a visa in the United States, it is crucial to be able to tune into the sensibilities of the people who will assess your application. Without it, your hopes will remain unfulfilled dreams.

This book was written to help you avoid missing opportunities in the United States simply because you didnt know how to meet unspoken expectations. It is based on real-life experiences reported to me by the many international students and professionals whom I have guided over the years.