An exploration of Indonesian students’ experiences of transitioning from studying in their home countries to studying in a UK university.

This study explores the experiences of three Indonesian students of transitioning from their home country to studying at the University of Sheffield. There has been a considerable amount of work already published regarding the experiences of Chinese students who study in the UK but little on Indonesian students despite over 3000 every year enrolling for study at UK universities.
In a series of unstructured interviews with three Indonesian students (two female and one male) who were currently or had recently been enrolled at the University of Sheffield, this study sought to discover what their expectations had been about studying in the UK before they left Indonesia, what challenges they encountered when they arrived and how their feelings changed as they progressed through their degree.
The interview transcripts were thematically analysed (Braun & Clark 2006) and Bourdieu’s notions of capital, habitus and field were utilised as a conceptual framework to interpret participants’ experiences as reported in their interviews. Gale and Parker’s (2014) transition typology was also drawn on to identify different types of transition experienced by participants.
Several themes emerged as important to all three participants when describing their experiences of transition. These were: differences in teaching methods between the two countries; difficulties in adapting to the style of academic English used at Sheffield; differing expectations of what UK higher education would be like; and the impact of different socio-economic backgrounds when arriving in the UK.
Using the typology of Gale and Parker (2014), the study concludes that all participants completed the first two types of transition: T1 (induction) and T2 (development). Successful completion of T3 (becoming), where individuals reach a stage of feeling ‘at home’ in their new environment was harder to establish. Some recommendations for how Indonesian students might be more effectively supported by UK universities are also made.