Under pressure, in the loop

The lives of international students seem to be rosy from back home, but what do they actually go through?

Stock photo of international students. Photo: Courtesy

The Oak Grove Apartments in Oxford are weirdly designed. The front door opens straight to the staircase, faintly lit by either a dimming yellow light or the sunlight that just barged in, depending on what hour the door is opened.

To the right of the door of #4019 at Oak Grove, a shoe rack is filled to capacity and showered with old letters, mostly from credit card companies, that are mixed with dirty socks and shoes. Together they’ve created a stench that spreads right into the living room, where a white queen-size mattress lies, blistered with brown spots, bereft of a bed sheet, under a light that is almost always turned off.

On the bed, a pile, formed by pillows and blankets, is accompanied by worn-out headphones, leaving little room for a guest to sit. For Mahesh Pillai [pseudonym], the pile makes space, and he calls the mattress his home, more than eight thousand miles away from his actual one in Chennai, India.

Mahesh arrived in Oxford, Mississippi, in August last year to pursue a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Mississippi – the biggest voyage of his life, with his two large-sized luggage filled with what he would need to start a whole new life.

Both of them now sit on the two ends of his mattress, clothes peeking out to see whether a closet has appeared to allow them some rest. The idea of buying a closet makes Mahesh laugh, saying that he always thinks about it while smoking, but forgets as soon as the cigarette hits the ground.

Beyond the luggage near the end of the mattress is the fireplace, which has now been turned into a carpet storage area, attracting all kinds of dirt that comes into the apartment, the tongs turning antique with dust marks every day. On the other side sits Mahesh’s study table, which, despite the mess of personal items, documents, books, and a bible, has a row of eight beer cans, assorted by flavor and color, and a small bottle of whiskey at the end, showcasing what lies beyond Mahesh the chemical engineer, a man fond of food photography.

On the opposite side of the mattress lies a couch or its remains, on which nobody is allowed to sit because it might crumble and take their security deposit with it.

The living space seems to belong in a shadow realm, devoid of proper lighting. There is a light right on top of Mahesh’s bed, waiting to flood the place with light, but he is not allowed to turn it on.

“I used to keep it on when I first moved in, but one of my roommates told me that I have to pay extra electricity bill if I kept it on. So, I just stopped turning it on altogether,” he let a sigh out.

***

Soon-to-be 24, Mahesh did his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Physics, but what brought him to the University of Mississippi is a PhD in Chemical Engineering, making him part of the international student population in the US, which is over a million.

India and China, countries with an annual per capita GDP of $2,480 and $12,614, according to the World Bank, lead the charts in terms of student enrollment in the US. Every year, these students flock to university campuses across the country to realize the American dream that Hollywood hollers worldwide, only to then realize the hardships that happen off-camera.

Upon arrival, they face a host of issues, from finding affordable housing, jobs that make it possible for them to survive, food insecurity, and social isolation to dealing with a completely different and complex medical system.

“Increasingly over the last few years, we’re seeing international students that are navigating just more complex financial situations,” Kate Forster, Director of Advocacy at UMatter – University of Mississippi’s organization for student support and advocacy, said. “We help with financial concerns, housing concerns, and for graduate international students that may arrive and have a family with them, just trying to navigate the needs of their family as well on a pretty small graduate student stipend.”

Graduate international students have a fixed stipend coming their way, but in many cases, it’s not enough for them to live a full life, especially when many have to send money back home, while many have to work minimum wage jobs just to survive in a new country. For many, every day is a story of struggle, every paycheck a process of counting pennies.

One problem, though, has started to pile on these existing problems with crushing weight – a concern about their immigration status.

In recent months, international students have been shot into the spotlight as plainclothes

ICE [Immigration & Customs Enforcement] officers have captured students from the street. On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, was detained outside of his apartment in New York, followed by Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk being picked up from the street in Massachusetts. As of April 10, almost 1,000 students saw their visa either revoked and/or their SEVIS record terminated, putting their legal status in danger.

While the Trump administration’s crackdown has brought attention to them, the community’s struggles, especially those of their daily lives, continue to be papered over by bold, capitalized, billion-dollar numbers.

Underneath, cracks appear.

***

Mahesh has to carefully step into the restroom on the upper floor, making sure he doesn’t step on the cracked tile that’s perfectly placed for the first step.

Despite having a restroom three steps from his bed, he has to share this one because one of his roommates uses the one downstairs.

Mahesh’s relationship with this roommate is almost reminiscent of Harry Potter and his cousin Dudley. Like Harry early on, Mahesh also lives near the stairs. Dudley danced on the stairs to make Harry miserable, Mahesh is made to go up the stairs to relieve himself.

The light in the restroom flickers for a while before spreading a soft yellow light across, revealing the reddish marks the iron in the water has left everywhere. The medicine closet behind the mirror is empty, while the closet by the wall has some facewashes and razors sporadically spread across amidst a dark abyss.

Mahesh, in his chemical engineering project, is working on quantum technology for optoelectronic applications. If all goes well, their experiments will help create clean energy and cheaper LED lights, and maybe then, he will get to solve the lighting issues that exist across the apartment, and maybe escape the shadow realm at home.

While his two roommates occupy the two bedrooms on the upper floor, Mahesh has nothing to complain about where he sleeps because of his acquaintance with it – during his undergrad days, he lived in dorm rooms with two other friends and then spent a year outside of his university in a similar arrangement. All of this has left him with an apathy towards privacy, and with his work hours, he rarely has to worry about it.

According to his F-1 visa regulations, Mahesh is supposed to work 20 hours a week. However, the nature of his research ensures that he works more than that, including weekends. “I don’t stay at home for very long. Sometimes, I have to work until 8-9 pm, and then I have to fall asleep fast because I’ll have to get up early in the morning for classes,” he said with his WhatsApp call log open, displaying one call after another with his supervisor.

Mahesh is left with little room to breathe as he needs to maintain a 3.25 GPA, at least, to go ahead with his PhD, but he also has to make sure the experiments are going well, “My advisor always tells me to focus on course work because it’s very important. But my project mentor will always say that coursework is nothing. You need to focus on the project because we need to submit some abstracts, because for every project, there is a deadline.”

For his troubles, though, he gets paid well in comparison to other Graduate students at Ole Miss. His yearly stipend is 23 thousand dollars, roughly 1,800 per month after health insurance and taxes. However, he only gets to spend around half of it, sending the other half home.

When coming to the US, he had to take out some loans. While those have already been repaid, he still sends money to help his family with other loans they have. Both his parents have professional jobs, but with a younger brother at home, he is the only other person working and able to contribute. “If I don’t send this money, it’s not like there will be a massive problem. But it helps my parents, so I just send it,” he said.

And thus, living in the living space. It costs him around $300 per month, a significantly lower amount considering the housing situation in Oxford, where currently the average rent of a two-bedroom apartment is $1,950, according to Zillow; while a ‘cheap’ apartment costs $1,200, according to AP Oxford realtor Jayde Taylor.

Even when he is paying a rent lower than most international students in the town, Mahesh has to keep a count of how much he is spending whenever he goes to shop for groceries or out with his friends.

For many graduate students, the situation is even worse. The minimum stipend for a graduate student at Ole Miss over two semesters is currently 13 thousand dollars, which comes down to less than $1,500 a month without health insurance and tax cuts.

“You only look to survive, you can’t think of enjoying. You may want to buy a gaming console or just go on a tour somewhere, but you can’t because you don’t have the money,” Aminur Alam, a graduate student from Bangladesh in the Anthropology Department, who earns $13,500 for two semesters and pays $650 for housing, explained.

Many international students have their partners living with them, while some are planning to bring them over. One of them is Meshkatul Hakim, a friend of Aminur, studying in the same department. His rent is higher, costing him more than $700 each month, and next Fall, his wife will be moving in with him, leaving him in a pickle about what to do. Even when he is living alone, his bank balance doesn’t let him do anything.

“The money I have left after rent and utilities generally goes away paying for groceries and personal loans. I cannot go to eat out, and as I don’t own a car, I cannot even afford Uber rides to visit different places,” he said.

Buying a car, though, is difficult for any international student. Shakil Amin, pursuing his master’s degree in criminal justice and living in one of the bedrooms above Mahesh, after months of searching, finally managed to buy a Toyota Prius for $7,000, an amount that has driven him into debt.

“I could only save around $3,000 since coming here, and I did this by cutting off any unnecessary expenses. To buy the car, I had to borrow money from my friends here, but now, I don’t have a job lined up for the summer. How will I pay them back?” Shakil, who earns $14,000 for his two semesters at Ole Miss, said while looking for an insurance deal, which ended up stacking $100 on top of his monthly budget.

According to the Graduate School at the University of Mississippi, the stipend for graduate students has increased in the past six years; however, the minimum stipend is well below the national average, which was $18,800 in 2023, according to the National Center for

Education Statistics. Back then, the minimum stipend for students at Ole Miss was $11,000.

“In addition to encouraging units to pay above the minimum, we are working to increase minimum stipends, and those have increased over time. We continue to advocate for increases to minimums and what the hiring units pay graduate assistants,” Annette S. Kluck, Dean of the Graduate School, responded. “As a part of this, I share data on the minimum stipends and average rents for the SEC with senior leaders. We also started participating in a national survey 3 years ago, which allows us to see average stipends for other participating universities, and those results are shared with senior leaders.”

For many, the increase is unlikely to happen, like Aminur and Meshkatul, as their offer mentioned that they would get the same stipend in their second year as well. For others, cold news came out of Washington as the Trump administration opted to freeze federal funding, leaving students and departments in limbo about what to do.

***

Mahesh’s Instagram stories rarely feature him. It’s often propping up the photography company that his friends back home set up, otherwise it’s reposting stories his friends posted and tagged him. Even his profile picture includes two other friends alongside him.

Friends have always been a big thing for him. Before coming to the US, his biggest concern was finding them.

“All I wanted was a group of friends [before coming here]. I did not think about how the university is or what my lab would look like. All I wanted was to have a group with whom I could have some fun,” he says with an ear-to-ear smile.

He has found a couple of groups here already, with whom he spends most of his little free time. What is more difficult to manage is his relationship – long-distance gets difficult when living in two different time zones and completely different schedules.

Once Mahesh returns home, he intends to marry her. However, problems persist, especially when he has little time to talk to her, leaving her in a difficult situation. “Compared to me, she is suffering a lot more. Because here, I am fully packed for all seven days of the week. But it’s not like that for her,” he says. “Besides that, I can share my feelings easily with my friends. If I want to cry, I call my friends and cry. She is not like that. She only has me to share with. That is making her uncomfortable, especially with people telling her that I will change after coming here.”

Mahesh tries to be with her as much as possible. On a Saturday morning, as he was helping his friends prepare lunch after a party the previous night, he was on the phone with his girlfriend, talking in Telugu, his mother tongue.

These strong ties back home have made him sure of what he wants to do once he graduates. He might stay in the US a year or two, but he wants to go back home and work there, instead of chasing citizenship.

“I will not stay here. I will definitely go back to India. I love my country. It’s my place and my people. I just wanted to come abroad to get exposed to the diversity of different cultures and different ways of learning. I have no personal connections or interest in working or settling here,” he said.

***

The Rebel Market at Ole Miss warms up after 12 p.m., an hour after lunch is served.

Mahesh can be found there around an hour later almost every day, generally around the

Global Kitchen section, mostly with friends.

While many international students make use of the free meal swipes the University pantry hands them, Mahesh has to buy one of 25 meals every month, spending around $200. He has no other choice but to; between his classes and lab work, this is the only place he can afford [his time] to eat.

He doesn’t have any dietary restrictions, allowing him to taste all the items available, from the BBQ section to the Vegetable aisle, but his favorite remains Global Kitchen. There is a simple reason why – it serves Asian food regularly.

In there, works Renu Akter, a first-year finance undergrad, earning $12 an hour. A good deal compared to Mississippi’s minimum wage of $7.25, less so when she is pregnant.

While serving rice, chicken, potatoes, chickpeas, and naans, Renu dons a smile, which disappears at the bus stop. Living at the Links, she has to rely on the Oxford University Transit to come to campus, with only one bus on her route – meaning missing it once costs an hour, sometimes even more, depending on the driver’s mood.

Renu got to know about her pregnancy after getting her visa, at which point she had abandoned her one year of college at a university in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and had no way to not come to the US. So, she did, alone, leaving her husband back home.

She arrived in Oxford with a 92% tuition scholarship, but the costs of the remainder of that have unexpectedly tripled with the inclusion of several other fees. Regular health check-ups, despite having health insurance, have already added more than $700 to her account, a cost that will only get higher as she moves closer to her due date.

Four months pregnant, Renu is also concerned about what to do once the baby arrives.

While she is receiving help from the Human Resources and Title IX departments at the University, she doesn’t have anybody to take care of her or her baby, with her husband’s visa situation still under processing.

“I will have to do my classes on campus at some point, meaning I will have to keep them in daycare. If there are no buses that go there, I have no way to go. And then I will also have to think about the money,” Renu spoke, covering her eyes from the bright afternoon sun, to see if her bus had arrived.

As one bus passes after another at the Observatory stop, she talks amidst the humming and buzzing bus engines about whether her husband will find a job even if he manages to arrive in time for her delivery, and wonders how much she should spend on her credit card before it becomes too big a burden.

She then opens her phone to check where the bus is, and with it still far away, starts talking about birthright citizenship and whether the Trump administration will get rid of that too. “What will be the point of going through all this trouble then?” she vents a bit, mentioning an

Indian PhD student who went back home after conceiving.

Worries about the President’s second term are not just restricted to that. For many, there is no way to go home.

***

“I can’t go home. I can show you my home on Google Maps, it’s just a few thousand miles away,” Suraj Dhakal, a Nepali PhD student in Physics, cracked this joke in a party on a Friday night, just after someone asked him how he will go back to his apartment as the last bus ran off outside the eyesight of the group of four, standing on the balcony.

Mahesh and Shakil were two of them. Both plan to go back home in December during the winter break. Lucky for them, Trump’s proposed list of countries with visa restrictions did not apply to their passports.

It did to Fawad Pathan’s. It has been two years since he left home, and he had been planning to go home in the summer, the only time he will be able to excuse himself from his two Master’s degrees – one in Aviation Law, one in Journalism. That plan came to a standstill when Trump’s proposed list included Pakistan in the list of 43 countries, marking it ‘Visas sharply restricted’ under the color orange.

For him, it’s yet another challenge in his time in the country, a list that seemingly keeps going on. He smiles when he talks about the visa restriction despite the worry, finding a silver lining that maybe this will force the Pakistani government to sort their house out. His face, though, turns a bit red and his voice a little sharp when he talks about ICE raids across the country, and particularly, in Oxford.

“It concerns me to the point where I am concerned about other people, but if you ask me about myself, no. It doesn’t concern me at all, and if anybody even tries to play with me, I’m just not going to let them because I’ve given a lot to my education and I’m not just going to let anybody give a nonsensical reason and tell me that this is this and this is that. No, you can’t do that. You have nothing on me,” he said.

However, there are reasons for concern. On January 29, nine days after Trump took office, the International Student and Scholar Services at Ole Miss, in their weekly newsletter, asked students to carry copies of their passport bio page, signed I-20, and I-94, with several e-mails going around campus from different sources asking international students to stay safe as ICE raids began in the city. Since then, the weekly newsletter has regularly carried those instructions, and a week later, they added a section helping students know their immigration rights.

Next week, it included information about ‘Red Cards’ that would help students assert their rights and defend themselves in case ICE approaches them. On April 9, they announced the creation of a new website that provides the latest information on U.S. immigration policies, executive orders, travel advisories, and other updates that may affect international students, scholars, and their families.

While fear seeps in, many students have no way but to try and survive. An Iranian student, unwilling to reveal their name, stated, “We want to go through [all this] because we have a lot of economic problems. And we want to make money.”

For Iranian students, there is no way of looking back. Most of their visas are single entry, meaning unless they want to finish their degree and return home for good, their only way out is to make it to the finish line, where the red ribbons mark a green card.

While students dream of sprinting into the light at the end of the tunnel, it turns out to be a marathon, and sometimes, even finishing it doesn’t matter, as Mahmoud Khalil found out.

***

Mahesh is completely oblivious to what happens in the political landscape. He didn’t read any of the newsletters asking him to carry his documents. He has no clue about who Mahmoud Khalil is.

Just returned from a conference in Biloxi, Mississippi, his eyes turn into full circles when he hears about what has been happening in the country, only for a second. In the next, he fixes his white lab coat and looks around his lab.

The vacuum-sealed container grabs his attention, and he moves there to take a vial of liquid out. It was made using perovskite quantum dots, which are fluorescent, making them more luminescent – in layman’s terms, these are supposed to work better in LED lights. He uses a small torchlight to shed light on it, upon which the maroon liquid turns bubbly pink.

For the next hours, he will walk amidst the metal and plastic jungle of equipment, gas tanks, and lab tools. The lights shine bright white in the lab, contrasting with his home, and while the window in his kitchen always lets him know what time of day it is, the advancement of science is unforgiving, keeping him in the dark without using its by-product.

Seeing that it was past 5 p.m. on his phone, Mahesh let leave a sigh of something in between relief and exasperation, knowing that he was already working for hours but only had to stay for a couple more.

For most PhD students in the scientific field, it is a common occurrence for them to work more than the 20 hours their F-1 status allows. “I think the 20-hour limit is really about putting a cap on how many non-learning hours we are stealing from students in exchange for their stipend,” Dr Kevin Beach, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Mississippi, explained about students working more. “If you were working on in your lab, running your experiment, working on your PhD dissertation, I think there’s really not a limit on what people are spending on that.”

“International students have to look for jobs after completing their PhDs. If their work is limited to 20 hours a week, that will significantly reduce their output for research. Also, American citizens don’t have that limit, so if they are restricted to that time limit, it does not leave an even playing field for everybody,” Dr Anuradha Gupta, Assistant Professor at the same department, said.

With the extra hours at the lab alongside the studies, it leaves science students crammed in their calendars, and for Mahesh, that doesn’t allow him to have a full social life. However, he has made his peace with it. So much so that even his body doesn’t allow him, setting an alarm clock for him to fall asleep, regardless of his location. The most common thing during their parties, according to his friends, is that Mahesh will be asleep before 2 a.m., no matter what the others are doing.

“What can I do about it? I will go to sleep early, and I will wake up at 8 a.m. Even if I want to sleep until noon, I can’t,” he laughed.

What would he do if he got a week off? “I would just eat whatever I like and sleep,” he says with a smile. “During the two days of the conference, my supervisor did not call me, and I felt like I was on vacation. There was a beautiful port in Biloxi just outside my hotel. I did not even go there because all I wanted to do was sleep.”

***

When friends come over to his apartment, Mahesh makes tea. While making it, he looks no different than when he is performing a chemical experiment, handling the milk

with as much care as possible. Put him in a lab coat, and someone might mistake the boiling brew for a mini-Chernobyl.

As the tea gets ready, he scrambles to find mugs, which end up being one short of the number of people in attendance. So, he improvises, using the cap of a flask as his cup.

As he starts washing the mugs, a small cockroach walks over to the sink, and for a second, both, or at least the Homo Sapien there, looked at each other, before the roach went back into hiding, probably desperate in eagerness to tell the tale of their miraculous survival.

“I’ve given up on getting rid of them,” he says, pouring the tea. “I tried to, but there are way too many, and they keep coming back. I just wash everything before using now.”

Once done with tea, Mahesh starts planning for dinner. Once dinner is done, he will try to do an assignment or touch up on his lab reports before his body goes into automatic shutdown.

When the restart is complete, he will go to his classes, and then his lab, and if he is lucky, then be back home in the evening. Like a cassette stuck in the player, playing on a loop until the plug is pulled.

“I know PhD life is like this, and I chose this one. So, I will not take it as a burden,” he reassures.

Many feel the same way. Many know there’s no escape. For many, there is no way to escape. Yet, many are still running to get in the loop.

The cassette player keeps playing the American dream. Who feels what the ribbons inside are going through?

[The name of all the students in this article has been replaced by psuedonyms to protect their privacy.]

[[This work was produced as the final project for a graduate-level Journalism course (JOUR 668) under the supervision of Vanessa Gregory at the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi]]