Reflecting on Indian Students in American Universities

When the time came to start Project Four, our group began by looking over each other’s autoethnographies, and concluded that Mudit’s paper would be best for a popular audience. We concluded that Martin’s paper about being a part of the PC gaming community, and Clark’s paper about being a southern male at a northern boarding school, would be more difficult to adapt to a video than Mudit’s paper about international students, specifically Indians, and their experiences attending American universities. We then decided how we would split up the work load and concluded that Mudit would be in charge of video editing, Martin would compile our reference page, and Clark would spearhead the reflection paper mostly. As a group we filmed, narrated, and composed our script. Once this decision was made, we began dissecting Mudit’s paper for specific uses of personal evidence, his thesis, and his literary analysis. Through this our beginning, middle, and end of our video almost naturally constructed itself.

The purpose of our autoethnography on paper is to explain one member of our group’s essay through a compelling video which uses specific rhetorical choices to appeal to a popular audience. Beyond the clear objective of producing a video, it was clear that this wouldn’t be possible without learning how to work as a collective unit with one another. As a result, through the development of this project, we learned to work as a unit by splitting up specific duties, adapting a schedule to work together that met everyone’s needs, and by communicating our ideas cohesively to create our final production.

In this autoethnography, our main purpose to convey to our viewers is that international students, Indians specifically, are coming in larger numbers, but there is still an immensely prevalent issue of students struggling to adapt to American college life because of social barriers, acculturation issues, and differing moral values. As a result, this often leads to internationals students initially having struggles academically and socially. To convey this, we decided to construct our video in a way that focuses primarily on Mudit as the main character and follows him in linear manner of starting broad, then focusing in on his specific personal experiences, followed by what other authors have already studied, and closing with why it matters to society and how Mudit has overcome his obstacles. We chose this pattern because we thought it was easiest to follow for our viewers and we our ending concludes in a different place than where we started.

The visual and audio content in our video was chosen cohesively by all three members in our group. We filmed and recorded on four different occasions together to ensure that all our ideas could be voiced together. As it can be seen in the video, many of the scenes have two of our group members in it. The videos shot around campus were frequently filmed by Clark, but Martin, and Mudit can often be seen in these clips. For example, Martin and Mudit’s staged conversation at the Benson picnic tables depicts this as well as Martin and Mudit at the Bridge when we debunk Indian stereotypes. We also adapted our audio to include everyone’s actual voices. We decided that Clark’s voice would work best for an introduction, and Martin’s tone would be more sufficient for describing Indian stereotypes as well as Mudit’s friend’s interview and his friends personal experiences. Mudit’s voice was chosen naturally to describe his personal experiences as well as presenting the “so what” portion of our video. The interviews between Mudit and Clark were also specifically placed in our video to help follow our order of broad to in depth, to ensure a sense of closure. The final segment of our video where we are discussing in and out groups provides closure to our piece by Mudit explaining how he felt once to be in the outgroup, but over time has become more comfortable at Wake Forest and feels as if he is apart of the ingroup now. We found this to prove how coming to college in the United States poses an initial shock, but can be overcome after getting acquainted to the new circumstances.

Consistency was an important part of developing this autoethnography. Our text that we use at the beginning differed from white, to blue, to red and after through our peer’s responses to our video during workshops, this was found to be a recurring issue. As a result, we adopted a white text with a black border that reads clear in each of our segments. We found this little adjustment to make our video flow much smoother and makes it easier for viewers to follow our work. The camera angles of campus that we created also follow a pattern of horizontal panning to continue this consistency for our viewers.

What all of this boils down to is that through this project, we learned hands on how to work together and to adapt to each of our members advantages. We each brought different talents to the table and it ended up working out very well. When we were assigned to work with one another, we were able to almost seamlessly identify our strong points: Mudit specialized in editing, Martin crafted our reference page, and Clark headed script writing and the group reflection. Our ability to figure out one others skills early on really enabled us to make headway quickly. We created a group chat to communicate the times that we could work together during our busy schedules. Communication was key to the organizing when we would work and how we would allocate our time together. This taught us how to be productive as a unit. During our first meeting it was clear that we struggled to really begin actual work and were sitting around debating on how we should begin. Through this we learned to just try things and if we failed, we learned a way to not do it so in reality we got closer to achieving our goal even if we were technically doing it wrong. By taking these chances with shooting clips, we began to slowly gather footage that built on one another like a snowball until we found by trial and error what we really wanted to accomplish. As a result, our group learned more through this project about how to work with other people than to create a video in general, which we believed was the overall purpose of this project and the culmination of what we’ve learned in this intro Writing 111 class. These skills that we learned will help us throughout the rest of our college experience and has even laid the groundwork for us to work with others for the rest of our lives.