“This American Life”

[May 2011 Issue]

By Lena Diesing

Coming to SAIS as a foreign student is an adventure. There are lots of small things that happened to me that made me say, “Hum, really?“ in daily activities. I am far away from home, I rarely communicate in my most comfortable language, I cannot find my favorite food in the supermarket… And I am only from Europe! If you ask me to summarize all of it, I would say the pattern is change. Granted, this happens with everybody who goes abroad. But as a foreigner at SAIS, there are basically two ways in which I changed: 1) I became internationalized. 2) I became Americanized. Yes, that’s a bit confusing.

Here’s what I mean. You become internationalized because you are not the only foreigner around. That sounds a bit trivial; this is a school for international relations after all. But it is something that I realized changed my personality in a very significant way. Suddenly, facing my graduation and the prospect of moving back to the German countryside, I realized how I became addicted to a place that feels like a global village. At SAIS, you read about some far-away country in a class, and at lunch you run into your classmate from there to have a short briefing on how things were in a time of crazy inflation. You receive emails from friends from another far-off country that detail the revolutions you would have never guessed were possible from TV reports. You celebrate parties for holidays in foreign lands you didn’t even know existed. So, even though I am a foreigner in the United States, I am a citizen of the global village, and my blue student ID is my passport.

And what’s up with the Americanization?, many have asked me. When I went back home over Christmas, one of my best friends told me: “You speak so ‘American’”. I was shocked! I spoke German, didn’t I?—how can I speak American German? Something had changed, my friend told me. Despite the international community, we live in the American capital after all, and we are exposed to all its good and bad cultural nuances. And that means you often do things the American way, even if that means your accent changes.

A discussion about the hot topic in international relations? Not without tuna sandwiches. A beer with your colleagues? Let’s start as early as possible, when it would be the right time for coffee somewhere else. Need a car, a fridge or some ice cream? Take the bigger version (and buy the one where you get something in addition). Well, I could go on like this forever. To all those small things, there are the big things of the capital: seeing three lights settle near the Washington Monument, hearing sirens and thinking: “that’s Obama coming home for dinner”, or counting diplomat’s cars on Mass Ave. In the end, you like it or hate it I suppose—but your friends will know in any case that you have spent time in the United States.

Lena is a second-year M.A. candidate concentrating in Global Theory and History.

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