July 18th 9:00-11:00 am Orchard Event Space (Room 1116) Vancouver is one of the most expensive cities in North America in terms of real estate prices which has a huge effect on international students in the city. The study aims to analyze the real estate market in Vancouver and evaluate the effect of demand as well as legislation on real estate prices in the city. For understanding the factors affecting the real estate market prices, secondary research was performed. For the market scenario, real estate prices were analyzed for a sample of 10 streets in the city and a survey about the perception of international students in Vancouver about the real estate prices in the city was conducted. Primary analysis results revealed that demand for rental units is high in the city which has led to a rise in prices. This is likely to affect the decisions of international students while choosing Vancouver as their destination.
0 Comments
July 17th 2:30-2:45 pm Room 3058 Groupthink is the concept of behavior where people tend to adopt the view of the predominant group. According to Henningsen (2006), the tendency of groupthink is hard to avoid in group work, and it may be directly influenced by members' individual confidence. Many instructors choose to let pupils work in groups at Vantage College which could develop students’ leadership and cooperation ability. The group work is more frequent than expected and closely related to students’ expectation of themselves and study experience. The purpose of this research is to find out whether groupthink would produce negative or positive influences during the process of group work. After collecting and analyzing their opinions from individual interviews with each participants, researchers found out that slightly more people consider groupthink positively exists in group project. Hence, this research may help students to understand how to cooperate and performe better to complete group work effectively.
July 18th 12:00-1:45 pm Vantage Commons Recently, more and more students decide to study abroad to gain better education and widen their outlook. Previous research has studied the geopolitical, social-emotional and other possible factors which influence international students’ social integration. However, these studies did not reflect the method that international students applied to integrate into social life. Therefore, our research is to further probe international students’ feelings when arriving in a new environment and to seek the efficient method to ease stress as soon as possible. We use a survey approach that invites 20 vantage students to complete an online survey. Preliminarily findings show that international students’ different stress and personalities impact on their Canadian social life integration. International students generally have difficulties integrating into Canadian social life. Thus, most vantage students have friendship circles from the same nationality. This research could advise education institutions on helping international students regulate their life.
July 18th 12:00-1:45 pm Orchard Event Space (Room 1116) Stress is a major component of student’s mental issues, while academa is the major income in university, it shared an interrelationship with student’s personal relationship. Previous research has investigated the causation of other schooling factors (such as gender and major) and stress (Lilienfeld, et al., 2016; Millett-Thompson, 2017; Murphy, et al., 2009). However, the schooling factor, personal relationship, and its relationship with stress requires more attention. The purpose of this research is to detect the interrelationship between academic stress and personal relationships and the level of its cyclical influences. A total of 15 interviews with first-year students from Vantage Arts has been conducted; the expected results are that the interrelationship is profound, and students would struggle to balance them. These findings may function as a stimulant to develop future university education methods and policies that can help balance student’s academic performance and their personal life psychologically.
July 17th 4:55-5:10 pm Room 3058 According to Lilienfeld, Lynn, Namy, Woolf, Cramer and Schmaltz (2017), social support is the available assistance from people around you. These researchers study the impacts of social support by differences in gender, ethnicity or major; however, few of them investigate the influences of social support among international students in Canadian universities. Vantage is a unique program that consists of international students at the University of British Columbia. In this study, I conduct a survey to evaluate perceptions of stress among Vantage Art students associated with their social support. There are 20 participants who choose to engage in this survey. The data shows that most of participants consider adequate social support as a significant mechanism to alleviate their stress. The finding suggests that adequate social support could enhance mental health of Vantage Art students throughout their university career.
Reference Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., Namy, L. L., Woolf, N. J., Cramer, K. M., & Schmaltz, R. (2017). Emotion and motivation- what moves us. In C. O. Donnell (Ed.), Psychology: From Inquiry to Understanding (pp. 425). Toronto: Pearson. July 18th 12:00-1:45 pm Vantage Commons Research on different choices of the emotional approach coping method in response to various degrees of academic distress helps the understanding of brain adjustment. While previous research has highlighted the association between distress and academic experiences, different emotional coping strategies and their relationship have not been well addressed. In this study, we examined the correlation between academic distress and the complexity of emotion-focused coping strategy. Twenty-seven first-year Vantage students were surveyed to indicate their degrees of distress and their emotion-focused coping methods. We find that the higher degrees of academic distress were reported, the more emotional approach coping strategies were indicated by participants. The result demonstrates that the more complex aggregation of emotion-focused coping methods would be used to encounter the more stressful university experiences. The result implicates further investigations for the explanations of the relationship between academic distress and their emotion-focused coping strategies.
July 17th 1:50-2:05 pm Room 3004 Many international college students may find the academic experience very stressful. Time management is suggested to serve as a potential coping strategy. While increases in time management behaviours (TMB) were found to reduce reactions to stressors among non-international university students, research in this topic has not addressed this correlation among international students – a group known to experience considerable amounts of stress. This study therefore examines the relationship between TMBs (e.g. setting priorities and organizing tasks) and academic stress (e.g. frustrations and self-imposed pressures) in the context of international students. 30 Vantage College Arts students completed an online survey which consisted of two adjusted questionnaires: Time Management Behaviours Scale and Student-Life Stress Inventory. Results show that students’ major engagement in TMBs is associated with lower levels of academic stress. This study’s implications may better inform future instruction of time management skills to international students for the reduction of their academic stress.
Does exercising influence the perception of academic performance for first year Vantage students?7/3/2017 July 18th 12:00-1:45 pm Vantage Commons Vantage college has been engaged in providing various supports for students to perform satisfactory academic outcome. However, it has been witnessed by Vantage students that exercise habits can be a huge contribution on gaining a better academic performance, is underestimated in Vantage college. Scholars have claimed that students’ exercise habit is strongly associated with their academic performance. However, previous studies were mainly focused on primary and secondary students, which lacked data on university students. Therefore, we aimed to explore the correlation between exercising habit and university students’ academic performance by conducting a questionnaire survey. Twenty-one students at University of British Columbia Vantage Arts Program have participated in the survey regarding their perception of academic performance, academic stress, frequency of exercise, and the types of exercise. The main finding of this research shows that the amount of time students spend on exercising is positively correlated with their academic performance; in other words, the more they exercise, the more satisfied they feel about their grades. This research can prove the importance of exercising habits to their students’ perception of academic performance, which can allow Vantage program to apply some physical education or create some workshops that can educate students on building a good exercising habit for the future Vantage students in order to improve their academic performance.
July 17th 3:20-3:35 pm Room 3004 The food choice has been an important aspect of the well-being of immigrants at today’s development. Although it has been widely investigated by researchers, there is a few researches about short-term migrated international students’ changes and situation. The purpose of this study therefore is to research to what extent international students adapt into local dietary environment. A survey was designed to collect and analyze data from 50 participants’ responses about their cuisine choices and dietary changes in the past year. The findings based on those data are expected to suggest that most of participants engage in Vancouver’s diverse dietary environment and their original food choices are gradually not followed. These results imply that with the process of international students’ adaption to a new place, students would temporarily give up their original dietary habits and change into the local food style.
The Impact of Listening to Self-Preferred Music on Vantage Students’ Academic Stress Reduction7/3/2017 July 17th 2:10-2:25 pm Room 3058 International students’ increasing stress is partly contributed by lower language proficiency (Akhtar and Kröner-Herwig, 2015). To help them reduce stress, listening to music may be effective, due to music’s capacity for influencing people’s psychological states (Yehuda, 2011). However, it is controversial about the relationship among self-preference, music, and stress. This research explores the impacts of self-preferred music on self-reported academic stress reduction for Vantage students. Surveys and an experiment are used. Thirty participants from Vantage College are assigned into two groups. One is a self-preference group where participants listened to self-selected music on YouTube. While participants in another group listened to the same music. Pre-experiment and post-experiment surveys measured academic stress levels. By comparing answers, we hypothesized that listening to self-preferred music could reduce Vantage students’ academic stress. Therefore, this research may promote Vantage students’ academic performances, subsequently, provides UBC International Student Support Office a new strategy for stress reduction.
|