What it’s like being a ‘third culture’ student

A third culture kid as defined by Wikipedia is ‘a term used to refer to children who were raised in a culture outside their parents culture for a significant part of their development years’.

Although most third culture kids I know (including myself) don’t fit this definition. I’d define it instead as growing up in vacuum between nationalities and cultures of that of your parents and to where you grew up in.

As I grew up for most of my life in Geneva, Switzerland internationalism was the norm. Most of my friends had parents from different nationalities and all of them spoke at least English and French, as French is the standardised language in south west Switzerland.

This Genevan bubble gave me  the illusion that this level of diverse nationalities was the same everywhere else. Hearing people speak three different languages by walking down a corridor at my high school was a daily occurrence.

I moved to Geneva when I was nine, like most other students at my school because of their parents jobs. When I lived in London being different was something I didn’t like about myself. I wanted to be like all the other kids in my class: 100 per cent English. I was embarrassed of my Brazilian heritage, to the extent that I would answer back to my mum in English when she spoke to me in Portuguese.

But today, I couldn’t be happier that she was so perseverant in teaching me her language and about her culture. By moving to Geneva, and truly becoming a ‘third culture’ student it ironically helped me appreciate both of my nationalities equally, as well the diversity of others.

Although becoming a ‘third culture’ student was a blessing in disguise it really made me hate the question: where are you from? A question that I really didn’t know how much I hated until I came to university here at Warwick. As my accent is so contingent on who I’m talking to I’ve got asked if I’m Australian, American and even Norther Irish.

In reality I’m not really ‘from’ anywhere. A feeling that most third culture students can strongly relate to. Owning a passport to a specific country, or having your parents being from a certain nationality doesn’t mean you see yourself ‘from’ that place. Neither does having lived there for nine years. I personally, do not feel like I am really from Switzerland, England or Brazil. To say I belong to one and somewhat to the other feels like a cop-out. For conversations sake in Freshers Week I usually stuck to Swiss – since that usually explained why I spoke English and French. Yet, I went to an international school and lived in Geneva which didn’t really leave me with the feeling of belonging to the Swiss national identity.

As a student of History, this year (as many remember with grief) we learnt about the creation of nation states and national identities. Being a third culture student, I would have to agree with Benedict Anderson in that national identities are ‘imagined’ rather than set in stone for centuries past. It is one of the ways I have come to terms with being a third culture student – that I can ‘imagine’ and formulate my own niche in existing national identities leaves me with a lesser feeling of exclusion

It’s also reassuring to know that almost all my high school friends share this sentiment. Most of them went to universities in the U.S., of which they have given me the feeling that they are more international than universities here. But still, it is a comfort to know many of them share this conflicting sense of identity all around the globe. I might not have a place where I am ‘from’ or a geographical location to call ‘home’, but being a third culture student has so many upsides. For the most part, having met so many amazing people from diverse backgrounds that I would never have met in any other situation. It is those friends that make any geographical location feel like ‘home’, and not the place itself. Sharing the same experiences although being from different backgrounds is what makes these friends so special, and ones that I will keep for a long time.

Having friends scattered all over usually means I only see them once or twice a year, but the internet makes it easier to keep in touch. Plus it means I get to fly out and visit them all over the world.

Funnily enough, having grown up as a third culture student was one of the reasons that I chose Warwick. Although U.K universities aren’t very international, this university has one of the highest rates of international students in the country at 40%.

So even though having no set national identity can suck at times I can’t complain, it’s given me more benefits than I can count and it brought me to where I am now.