Essay about Warning: Ready for a Culture Shock

Culture shock is the feelings of alienation, hostility, heightened ethnocentrism, sense of loss, depression and/or self doubt that may result from immersion in a new culture.

Culture is all about an individual knowledge based on belief ,art,morals customs.Therefore culture shock occurs when people have different values and beliefs and are not tolerant of each others differences(Eckermann,Dowd,Chong,Nixon,Gray and Johnson,2006.).The separation of important people in

I experience culture shock when I was a fourteen year old teenager and moved to the U. S. to leave with some relatives, I was sign up for high school here in the U.S. and being a freshmen I was worried the first day of school because my cousin said to me that freshmen and bullied at school, and that made me shy around school and It was thought for me to get used to the American culture. When I starting attending school it was great and I was extremely excited about the U.S schooling system, I had memories when I was only in first grade and thinking how school was great, then I moved back to Mexico and the schools feel different, from the chairs to the windows, everything is just different, those days I remember missing the U. S and missing

As is the case for many, high school was an interesting time for me. The first six weeks, I attended a white school. White skin, more rigorous academics, and racial slurs filled the school. Despite being white, I did not feel welcome due to not attending the middle school that fed into this particular school. The school I attended for the rest of my high school experience was quite the opposite. White people made up less than

The community I grew up in was very small. Everybody knew everybody! We were all taught to love everyone no matter what color they are. Where I grew up my grandmother was everybody grandmother. When she cooked everyone on our street was more than welcome to come and get a plate, if she had enough. As a young black African American girl I always heard about racism and what my race and other races had to go through. I went to three different elementary schools and we had kids of all race there. At Park Ridge Elementary is where I met my first friend of a different race. At Career Academy High School, in February we had a Black History Program. Our teachers tried to demonstrate what they had to go through by posting whites only on certain water

I was born in South Georgia during the 1960’s and attended elementary school in a small predominately white town. There was a segregation between the white and African American parts of town with separate schools, grocery stores, and churches. During these years we were not allowed to have any friends that were not white. My parents always stated that they were not prejudice but their actions spoke to the contrary.

After reading Varner and Beamer’s explanation of culture shock I was able to analyze my intercultural experience and can see that I experienced all four stages, euphoria, disillusionment, adjustment and integration. I believe if I would have left Chicago in the disillusionment stage I would have said my experience was negative, but since I stayed well after my adjustment into my new culture I now look back on this time as positive. At the time of my move I didn’t give thought to different cultures, I thought everyone would be like me, I know realize there are so many more aspects to culture, I don’t know if I could have been totally prepared for this experience. I do know in the future I will no expect things to be the same and be a little

Coming to the United States, having to learn a new language and a new way of living was a big change for me. I did not realize I have an accent when I spoke English until people started asking, “Where is that accent from?” The experience of coming to a different country made me realize I was different. Therefore, experiences are what makes a person acknowledge who they are. Cultural identity is one’s surroundings, beliefs, and experiences. Furthermore, what we do and believe is cultural identity. On the other side, there is invisible culture—invisible webs— where people see other cultures are different to theirs, but they do not see that their culture is different to others. Lived experiences is what makes cultural identity, not invisible culture.

A change in one’s culture will have effects that will challenge one’s identity. When cultures clash, one of the consequences is that a new identity will be formed within those that have been influenced in any way by the new culture. For better or worse lives will be changed, it is determined by whether the person conforms to the dominant culture or if they resist it.

The world is so vast in its plethora of culture and divergence, I yearn to see it all. I have an indescribable drive to know and to experience, it is often beneficial, but occasionally terrible because it causes me moral dilemma. My moral dilemma pertains to culture shock on a major and minor scale, between states and between blocks. I have asked myself, "Are you content?", in every situation and the answer always has and always will be no. My mindset is to create, excel, gain and give, it is hard to be satisfied when there is always more to learn or problems to be solved.

I never thought I was different and I never even saw or felt the differences. In my adolescent years, I thought my appearance mirrored my friends who had curly hair, caramel skin, and rolled their r’s when they spoke. In my head, there was no physical line to separate me from the people I grew up with. I am not sure if it was my innocence or the ignorance I had that explained this, but I know now that I was too young and unaware of my environment.

Culture Shock has played a tremendous role in the growth of cultural ecology because it is an issue that is constantly growing all over the world. In the United States, it may not seem like things are changing involving culture shock, but it is not any different then the changes in places like Africa and China for example. It is developing equally across the world because there are now more ways to travel. So, what exactly is culture shock anyways? Well, it is known as going to a foreign or unfamiliar territory that one is not used to, so they may feel symptoms of anxiety such as nervousness or shock because the customs, actions, beliefs, etc of those people may not seem familiar to them, so one may feel ill-prepared for the changing environment. Also, for example, if one was to go to school in the U.S. but came from China, they would feel culture shock because the rules in China are not the same as rules in the U.S. and so it may make one feel uneasy about the situation because they are not use to change and maybe the move was to quick for them to adjust properly. The United States is very different from foreign areas because the culture is very different. Where have people of Africa seen movie productions, music, sports, universities, iPhones, computers, etc? The answer is not where they live but in the United States if they traveled there before. This is exactly the issue with culture shock in ecology. Culture is what people behave like, feel, and do. Shock is a symptom

which is often due to loss of accustomed cultural cues and social rules. This research focuses

Culture Shock/ pg.12: The disorientation that people experience when they come in contact with a fundamentally different culture and can no longer depend on their taken-for-granted assumptions about life.

According to Berk (2013, p.454), the college experience is viewed by others as formative, a more influential than any other period of adulthood, because it serves students a “development testing ground,” a time for devoting full attention to exploring alternative values, roles, and behaviors. Therefore, the college experience is a huge contributor to psychological changes during early adulthood. But to contribute to favorable psychological changes during the college years, one must be exposed to “culture shock” (Berk, 2013, p.454). Culture shock is a good way for students to explore alternative values, roles, and behaviors, as well as, new ideas and beliefs, new freedoms and opportunities and new academic and social demands (Berk, 2013, p.454).