Tasha Da Cunha

Tasha was born in Canada and moved to Sri Lanka when she was five. Her mother is Sri Lankan and her father is Portuguese.

She described her initial thoughts before coming to Winona State University. She watched the movie American Pie and she saw "how much fun it is." She said she learned a little bit about American culture from movies, magazines, Internet and Facebook.

When she landed in the U.S., she thought, "This is just like the movies. Everyone is just running. Are we going to become like this?"

She describes her experiences with discrimination on campus. She works at WSU's Smaug, the university's food court and gathering place, "You meet a lot of people there, but then you see them during classes and they just walk by you. What did I do wrong to you? Don't you say 'hi' to everyone you know?"

She continued, "International students are so confused. Why do people do that? You ask my name and you don't know me the next second."

She has also been discriminated against because of her culture. She said her parents and religion have taught her to save herself for marriage. "I feel like guys don't want to talk to you because you're international and they know that. I don't like the fact that once someone knows you're international, they have a set of rules of how they think your life is."

Sri Lanka

She said she gets judged quite a bit. "You guys eat funny food, you think differently, smell differently." People ask her, "What's your story?

"I've always heard people say, 'Oh, look. They're international,' or 'what's with the color difference?' My friend is Sri Lankan and she is brown," she said. "We are from the same country. I'm white, she's brown. So what?!"

Tasha has had a negative experience working on group projects. "Working in groups is a big deal," she said. She described a situation where her and her friend didn't have a group for a project worth 35 percent of their final grade. The professor told her and her friend to do the project on their own. "We kept doing our work and getting stuck. Me and her had the same ideas." Two days before the presentation, Tasha and her friend began to have second thoughts. "What if we look like idiots? People have groups of five, and we are two people who think alike."

The pressures of being an international student caused the girls to buckle. They decided not to present their project to their classmates. "We were so pressured trying to figure the project out. We did everything, but we didn't show up that day to present." Worried they were going to fail the class, they wrote a note to the professor explaining the situation.

"We should have tried, but sometimes you get pressured into this corner where you can't come out. We didn't have the right guidance from the professor," she said.

"If we make the first move to ask someone to be in a group, people don't acknowledge you. If someone else comes up to us, they must really want to work with us," she said. "Sometimes people join us because they think we're smart. We're all humans and have the same brain. It depends on how much work you put into something. We work hard because that's how we are taught to work."

Tasha Da Cunha

Sri Lanka