Name: Bạch Nguyễn Hà Phương

Editor:

Topic: Challenges of Vietnamese freshmen in adapting to the university environment in this era.

“Although university life provides students many opportunities for growth, it can also be associated with

serious psychological distress” (Aspinwall, 1992). Indeed, attending a university means that students

have to adapt to a completely new environment. There are several challenges that they would learn how

to face, or else, alter their lifestyle to fit in. Above all, the essence of entering university from high school

is familiar with transiting from adolescence to adulthood. This transition requires them to handle and

organise things on their own without any intervention from their parents. As a result, numerous

obstacles are inevitable. Especially in Asian university environment and particular is in Vietnam, where a

secluded lifesyle is very sough-after. The answer for the enquiry why this lifestyle in creases the difficulty

of freshmen in adapting to university is quite complex. In a study of North American Institution,

Aleksandr stated that the nature of human adaptation is optimal adjustment to the demands of the

environment surrounding (2018). Hence, students may find it is hard to communicate or to connect with

others to call for support because they do not know how, they are unable to aware of what they need to

change to fix in that kind of environment. To go deeper in this issue, Camille Brisset and her colleagues

claimed that:

Psychological adaptatio can be understood within a stress and coping model and refers to feelings of
well being or satisfaction with transitions, although it is commonly evaluated through negative
affect, using measures of depression or mood disturbance (2009).

Research from ICBA Ins showed that Asian freshmen seem struggle to overcome first days at university,

while European one handle it easier. Throughout the adaptation process, first-year students will have to

face so many challenges, ranging from individual to social problem. Acording to the survey, over 24% of
students dropped out of university from the first year because they can not overcome the difficulties

(Alvedor, 2020). From that we can see, not only these challenges affect negatively to students’

performance but also their lives. For that reason, in this paper, the writer would like to indicate some

challenges that caused studnets’ disavantages in adapting to university in this era. To be more specific,

the integrated difficulty, mental issues and financial burden are seen as the three main types of

challenges that Vietnamese freshmen have to face with when adapting to the university environment.