So, you're from India?

In my work as a career counselor in a university, I meet all sorts of people. Most of our students are from the northeast Ohio area, but we do have about 750 International Students. Many of those students are from India. Some do plan to go home after they graduate, but lots of them would like to stay in the US, at least for a while. Working experience at a US company can be worth a lot to their careers when they return home. I should know more about them than I do, since I've met so many, but often I only concentrate on the questions they ask me about their US job search and I neglect to ask them about their home.

Lately I met a couple of students who were willing to tell me about their lives in India. Sometimes people meet someone from India and think they know all about them, just from that one fact. If I tell you I live in Ohio, you might have a preconception about what that means, but you can't really tell much about me from that. Certainly, you cannot characterize everyone in the whole United States as being a certain way any more than you can capture the essence of a person from a country as complex as India. With over a billion people living in a space about one third the size of the US, it must be an amazing place.

We were talking about how to be successful in a US job search, and how important the ability to be understood in English is to their networking and writing. I remarked to one student that her English was very good and easy to understand. I thought that her parents probably made sure that she worked on that proficiency. She said, "No, we always spoke in our native language at home. I went to a British school and practiced my English there." Another student explained that in India, every state speaks its own language, while Hindi is the "official" language. The accent you might have, the pace at which you speak, are determined more by where you live and the customs of that area.

You may have had the experience of calling technical support for your computer, and find you are talking to someone in India. They try to train the people to speak in US accents, and even assign them American sounding names, but it doesn't always work. Offshoring of US jobs is common in some industries, and it is a sensitive issue for people in the US who are looking for the very work that is being sent overseas. Instead of paying a US worker $25-30,000, companies can get someone in another country to do the work for a couple of thousand dollars--its' awfully tempting. Anyway, I once tried to get the person on the other end to talk about other things besides technical stuff, but he didn't really want to talk politics. He got a little nervous, so I dropped it. For one of my technical problems the person said he had to transfer me to their "Internet expert." I said OK--and then found I was talking to a community college student in Florida!

Back to the topic (there was a topic?). I think I'll try to learn more about the people I meet from other countries. One place to start is www.iloveindia.com .