Language barriers separate student body
By Peter Coutu | Feb. 15, 2016UW-Madison international student Xiaofei Xu struggled to integrate with the local community on campus—until he studied abroad in Paris with roughly 30 other students during the fall semester of his junior year. Xu grew up in a city near Hong Kong and decided to attend UW-Madison in 2013, without ever visiting the campus. Both the school’s history and journalism programs were ideal for him, Xu said. There are more than 4,000 international students from roughly 130 countries currently enrolled at UW-Madison, though most are from China. According to Xu, academic programs for international students at UW-Madison are geared toward students in science or engineering majors, which covers most of the students. But Xu, however, studies in the humanities, saying he hopes to graduate with a double major in history and journalism, while also learning French.
