Video: Making BU a Home Away from Home
Three international students open up about identity, belonging, and what it really means to be a global citizen at BU
Video: Making BU a Home Away from Home
Video: Making BU a Home Away from Home
Where is my home? Where am I from? How do I fit in?
For many international students, these seemingly simple questions don’t have easy answers. In the video above, we asked three international students—Sienna Chien (ENG’26) (Taiwan), Sunanda Guruprasad (Questrom’26) (India), and Emmanuella Erhunmwunsee (CAS’26) (Nigeria)—to share what it truly means to be a global citizen at BU as they were preparing to graduate. The students reflect on what it’s like to come from thousands of miles away to study at an American university—including facing the inevitable disorientation of freshman year and the quest for a sense of belonging.
The questions above are ones I carried with me as a freshman, half a world away from everything I knew. I was born in Chennai, India, and raised in Bahrain, having moved there when I was just three months old. After 18 years, I packed up and moved to the United States to study communications at Boston University. Three cultures—four, if you count the British school I attended in Bahrain—were all jumbled up in one person. An identity crisis was pretty much inevitable.
From the friends I made, to my eating habits, to the way I pronounced certain words, I kept having to choose between being different parts of myself. I didn’t feel “enough” with the Indian friends I made at BU, because I didn’t grow up in India. And I definitely wasn’t Arab enough to fully identify with my Arab friends, as I didn’t even speak their language. Picking and choosing between these pieces of me sometimes felt exhausting. And realizing that the places I once called home could never quite be home in the same way again was its own kind of grief.
As a freshman, I convinced myself that time was the one thing I didn’t have, even with four years ahead of me. I thought if I didn’t figure out who I was right then, I was doomed. But time was exactly what I needed to discover who I was. Being an international third culture kid means I’ve always been adaptable. I gave myself permission to slow down, look around, and realize that so many people at BU were navigating the same thing. Shifting my perspective on what it means to be from everywhere, rather than from nowhere, made all the difference.
That struggle, and eventual realization, is what led me to make this video—to have other international classmates offer their perspectives on what being a global citizen entails, in all its complexity.
I see this as my “letter” to every international student coming to BU. Give yourself time. As Sienna Chien says: “You have community all over the world—embrace it.” Sunanda Guruprasad reminds students that “your home is always growing.” And, as Emmanuella Erhunmwunsee notes, it’s okay to “step into new identities” as you move through the world. You don’t need a fixed definition of home or yourself. Home is the people you find along the way—and you are the sum of all of them.