We speak the same language, we watch the same television programmes and eat the same foods so college abroad should be a breeze, right? Right? Wrong.

An American admissions counsellor who was in Bermuda on a recruiting mission in November said Bermudians can experience culture shock just like other foreign students going to the United States for the first time.

?It is hard for Bermudians sometimes, because Bermuda is small,? said Sam Skinner, Director of International Admission at the University of Hartford where there are approximately 50 Bermudian students.

The University of Hartford is a small, independent college located in Hartford, Connecticut with 7,245 undergraduates and graduates. Like Bermuda, Hartford is a centre for finance and insurance services.

As a result, many Bermudian students go to the University of Hartford to get degrees in the financial arena, although some pursue degrees in fine arts, information technology and engineering, among other things.

Bermuda and Hartford may have similar industries but Bermudians can still have trouble adjusting to the new environment, particularly because cultural differences may be hidden.

?In Bermuda, they know everybody,? said Mr. Skinner. ?Bermuda is a real supportive environment. A lot of the students leaving the island have had a pretty good life here, and to be responsible for themselves is a challenge.

?It is hard for any young person to go away to college, but coming from an environment like this, I think it is even more difficult.?

Jon Beard, a graduate year teacher at Saltus Grammar School seconded this idea saying he could probably write a book on the problems that Bermudian students experience when entering college abroad for the first time.

Mr. Beard is responsible for helping Saltus students get their college applications together. He and other teachers at Saltus also take students on an annual tour of Canadian universities at the beginning of the application process.

?I find that the University tour to universities in Canada is a great eye-opener and culture shock,? Mr. Beard said. ?The concept of a university of 40,000, or a 101 class with 500 plus students is often outside the sphere of comprehension for someone from an island of 60,000 people.?

On the college tour Mr. Beard often meets with former students who have just started university.

?They are usually pleased to see a familiar face, and many are homesick to a degree, and are looking forward to coming home at Christmas,? said Mr. Beard.

?My experience is that they can?t wait to come home, but after a few weeks they can?t wait to go back. Usually, the next term is fine ?and by the second year I rarely see them when we visit a university, and although I always enjoy seeing them, it is indeed a mark that they are now comfortable with college life.?

Mr. Skinner from the University of Hartford said he thought Bermudian children tended to be more sheltered than children from other countries, which had its good and bad points.

?That is a great way to grow up, but at some point you do have to experience things,? he said. ?It is a hard adjustment.?

He said that while most Bermudians do eventually settle down, some have a more difficult time. Mr. Skinner said at a smaller school like the University of Hartford it is sometimes easier for professors and counsellors to notice when a student is having difficulty.

?We have a real stake in keeping our students enrolled,? said Mr. Skinner. ?We are a private university. We spend a lot of money to get the students to come, so we are really concerned with keeping them enrolled.

?If they are not cutting the mustard academically, then they are on their own. But if they are cutting the mustard academically then we are really going to do whatever we can to try to keep them. It doesn?t always work out.?

Mr. Skinner was on the island, not only to attract new Bermudian students to the University of Hartford, but also to connect alumni with prospective students, and also newer alumni. This allows the student to get home-grown advice and guidance.

?We don?t want surprises,? said Mr. Skinner. ?We don?t want Bermudians to show up and say ?I had no idea it was going to be like this?. When there are surprises, students leave.?

There is a tight-knit University of Hartford alumni group on the Island. This helps with ?culture re-entry?, the shock that students sometimes experience returning home to Bermuda.

?One of the reasons I come to Bermuda is to try to stay in touch with our alums and introduce the old alum to the new alumni so that they can assist them a little bit with the transition into the working life,? said Mr. Skinner.

?The transition is not always an easy one, especially when you are coming from the United States back. I think we have been pretty successful with that.

?We have a pretty supportive alumni group here. They are placed in most of the insurance companies so the University of Hartford?s name is well known by potential employers on the island.?

Mr. Skinner has been to Bermuda several times on recruitment work. He said the main concern of prospective Bermudian students is money.

?When they see our tuition figures, initially, they say, ?wow, that is a lot of money?,? said Mr. Skinner. ?We do have scholarship programmes that are designed to assist students from outside the United States, specifically Bermuda.

?Bermudians are lucky because there is a lot of scholarship money here on the island. Part of my work is to educate them, show them the steps to take.

Once they do that they find that although we are more expensive than a Canadian university, our largest competitor, but not that much more.

?When they start looking at comparison of services and what they can do at an American university versus a Canadian university, then they start saying it is starting to make more sense.?

He said the second main concern would, naturally, be getting a job when the student returns home to Bermuda.

?Even when I am talking with students I have a list of alumni they can contact,? he said. ?The prospective student can ask them how hard was it to get a job, and how hard were the transition years.?

Mr. Skinner spends ten to 12 weeks a year outside of the United States recruiting international students, mostly from North Asia and India. India is the number one country in exporting students to the United States.

?I try to replicate the same kinds of things in those countries that I do in Bermuda, but my efforts are not always as successful because they are larger countries,? he said. ?Bermuda is great because it is a contained place.

?Everyone knows everybody so it is easier to make connections than it would be in a place like India that is so spread out, so diverse, and has so many languages spoken.?

The student body at the University of Hartford is approximately eight percent international, which is evenly divided between graduates and undergraduates.

?They are important to us,? said Mr. Skinner. ?We have always had a core group of international students. One of the sentences in our mission statement is to try to educate students globally.

?You can?t do that unless your faculty have a lot of experience overseas. Eighty percent of our faculty have either studied or taught or conducted research overseas.

?That makes it quite a bit easier for students to come, because the professors in front of a lot of them have done the same thing the student is doing.?

Mr. Skinner said there are benefits to have a mix of students in the classroom.

?When you teach marketing today, you have to talk about how you would market by region,? he said. ?Are you planning on selling to this small town, or this state or region or to this country or globally?

?To talk about all of those things, it really does help to have someone who is Indian, or who is Muslim or who is Latino, for example.

?It matters when you are designing a marketing campaign. It matters when you are talking about management. It matters when you are talking about psychology or education and so on.?

The September 11, 2001 crisis and the resulting turmoil in the United States put even more pressure on international students.

The paperwork needed to study in the United States changed and increased, and there was increased negativity towards foreigners.

News programmes, for example, warned landlords not to rent to ?strange foreigners?.

Mr. Skinner said his university had tried very hard to monitor things and make sure international students weren?t experiencing any negative fall-out from the situation.

The president of the University of Hartford held two receptions for international students in the wake of September 11, and held individual interviews with international students to hear their views and make sure they were alright.

Mr. Skinner said, so far, his international students were holding up very well, and in fact it appeared that the Hartford community was going out of its way to be welcoming to students from other countries. ?That made me really proud,? he said.