Abstract

The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus welcomed its first students in September 2000 thus becoming the first ever branch campus of a UK university abroad. Being a global institution, the campus inevitably serves an international community of students. However, international students often face many problems in a new academic and social environment. This paper reports on the course-related and non-course related problems of Nottingham Business school students. It also looks at the issue of students’ “social adjustments”, “university experience enjoyment” and “stress levels” studying at the university. Both the international and local students acknowledged that English is a crucial factor in their life at the university. Meanwhile, international students experienced greater difficulties in settling in (adjustments) and socializing although “university experience enjoyment” and “stress” saw little difference. Finally, a binary logistic regression was performed and gender was found to be a significant factor for stress while student origin was unsurprisingly, a significant factor for “adjustment”, “socialization” and “university experience enjoyment”, with the locals having the upper hand compared with the international students.