Essays --

My main research question for this paper was : How do Social networking services affect Korean international students’ adaptation to the U.S.? Literature Review Before SNS such as Facebook, launched by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, (Carlson, 2010, Par.1) became popular, most Korean international students used internet community services such as Cyworld Mini Home where people post pictures or write an open diary or email services to share his or her daily stories with family or friends living in the home country. However, internet community services are a sort of one-way communication tool, so people need to regularly stop by and log into the community homepages in order to read or leave a message to his or her friends. On the other hand, although email services are a two-way communication tool, it is not easy to contact everyone regularly while studying abroad. Actually, there was no way for Korean international students to maintain close relationship with home country friends and family after going abroad. Moreover, it is even more difficult for adult foreigners to make friends with host country students because each of them may have di fferent cultural background or interest and concerns (Malarcher, 2004). As a result, many Korean international students experience emotional isolation and suffer from high mental stress because of homesickness, new relationship with classmates and cultural differences. For example, I had a chance to study in Omaha, Nebraska for nine months after finishing mandatory military services in 2002. At that time, I was not able to make American friends except for a couple of roommates since I had no chance to meet them privately, but also could not keep in touch with my friends in my homeland, so I ... ...., and Twitter Inc. became public companies, people seem to regard SNS only as a profitable business model. However, the original characteristic of SNS linking people closely is still effective. From that point, I reviewed related literatures and compared them with what I observed during last 6 months at GWU. First, SNS cannot replace face-to face communication, so it has a limited effect to help international students’ adaption to the new environment. Second, since SNS makes international students feel comfortable, if colleges use them as an educational tool to draw active participation of international students, it could work. I conducted this research only based on literature reviews and observations. Therefore, for the following research, I would like to conduct a survey of Korean international students to know how they use SNS to enlarge their human networking.