Exchange student Ivan Sangiorgi (left) of Italy talks with learning skills specialist Gentilella. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

“Wow, this is quite a crowd!” said Dacia Gentilella as 30-plus new students packed into a sunny, second-floor classroom in Devlin Hall. It was a humid Monday morning in late August, the start of fall classes still more than a week away. The students in the room were undergraduates, all from foreign countries. Some were freshmen about to embark on a four-year experience. Others were exchange students on a semester or year abroad, taking advantage of the weak dollar to study in the United States. Gentilella, a learning skills specialist who teaches in the English department, was there to give a crash course in American educational practices. She was one of five BC faculty and administrators simultaneously leading sessions like this, to accommodate the largest group of new international students ever to enter Boston College.

This year, approximately 80 freshmen enrolled at Boston College as international students—a little more than half entering the College of Arts & Sciences and most of the remainder opting for the Carroll School of Management—in all, twice as many as last year, according to Adrienne Nussbaum, director of the University’s office of international students and scholars. South Korea accounts for the largest share (approximately two dozen), followed by China and Canada. For now, the most popular intended majors cited by the freshmen are finance and economics.

In addition, more than 110 exchange students arrived from overseas this fall, marking a 50 percent increase over last year. The largest contingents hail from France, Australia, and Italy. Among exchange students, finance appears to be the biggest academic draw, followed by political science and economics.

For all of these undergraduates—representing nearly 40 countries—the Boston College experience started on Saturday, August 23, when they were met at the airport by their International Assistants, or IAs (BC students who are paired with two or three international students for the year). Over four days they participated in a typical college orientation—BBQ, a Boston Harbor cruise, an introduction to student organizations; they also took English placement tests and attended talks by BC administrators on such topics as “Healthcare in the United States and On-Campus” and “Everything You Need to Know about Immigration.”

Gentilella’s guided discussion appeared on the schedule with the title “American Values and the U.S. Educational System.” Also attending were a dozen or so IAs, distinguished by their red T-shirts. When the last seat in the room had been occupied, Gentilella announced her goal—to prepare the incoming students for American classrooms—but said that first she wanted to learn something from them. “What’s been the relationship between you and your teachers in the past?” she asked.

Several of the new students exchanged glances. Others gazed at Gentilella, as if unsure whether she expected a response. Gentilella waited.

At last, a young woman in a pale gray sweater raised her hand. “I’m from the Netherlands and actually don’t know my teachers’ names, and they don’t know ours,” she said in lightly accented English. “It’s quite anonymous.” A few students murmured quiet agreement. One, a young man with dark curly hair, who identified his home as Costa Rica, said he was accustomed to “a certain distance” between teacher and student.

Gentilella, tall and energetic, nodded as each student spoke. “Here,” she said cheerfully, “relationships tend to be fairly informal. Whatever class you’re in, it’s a very good idea to introduce yourself. Faculty members tend to be receptive to students who come and make themselves known.”

“What about group work?” she asked next. “What’s that been like so far?”

This time, the responses flowed more freely. “In Australia, we’re encouraged to study together, but when you’re writing, you write separately,” said James Skerrett, a tall, dark-haired sophomore spending a semester at the Heights.

“I’m from Denmark,” said a young man behind him, “and most exams are group exams. It’s not competitive within the group, but between the groups, it’s very competitive.”

“Yeah,” the boy next to him said. When he realized the room expected something more from him, he added, “I’m from Denmark, too,” to laughter.

Other Europeans described similar scenarios, then Gentilella weighed in. She predicted the students would find Boston College more like the Australian experience: Study together if you want, she advised, but do your assignments alone.

“As a culture, we’re very individualistic,” she explained, adding that the students would see proof of this come winter, when their American peers “will be wearing gear they could use to climb Mt. Everest,” around Chestnut Hill. “We’re all about, ‘pull yourself up,’ and ‘go get ‘em!’”—she paused as students started laughing. “We’re moving toward more group work, but American students feel they get where they are by working on their own. So if you find yourself feeling like other people are territorial, it’s not you. It’s us.” She grinned. “We have issues.”

Then she became more serious, and explained that in the past, some international students accustomed to working together have found themselves facing plagiarism charges. She recalled a case where two students taking an English class discussed a novel in great detail, formed a shared opinion of a character, and found supporting examples together. “They went off and wrote very similar papers,” Gentilella said. She urged students instead to “talk to others to figure out what’s happening, or about broad concepts. But when it comes to developing your thesis, be careful about working with someone else.” When in doubt, she added, students should ask their professors for clarification.

As if spurred on by this advice, students started firing questions. Would their grades come in numbers or letters? (Letters.) Would a syllabus tell them their due dates for the whole semester? (Yes.) Was it okay to disagree in class with a professor?

The last question caused Gentilella to hesitate. “Yes, ideally, it is,” she said. But she added that some professors are more welcoming of disagreement than others. “It’s a personality thing,” she said. “You’ll get a sense of whether it really is okay. The key is to disagree, but to do so respectfully. If you’re tiptoeing around, you’ll never have interesting discussions.”

Throughout the remainder of the conversation, the IAs contributed advice. One red-shirted young woman, a sophomore, said the biggest lesson she learned during her first year at Boston College was to ask for help early in the semester rather than wait and hope a problem would go away. It usually didn’t, she said. Gentilella nodded. “When you don’t know, ask,” she said. “It’s okay to ask for help.”

Sherry Pan ’12 (center) of Taiwan, in Gentilella’s Devlin Hall classroom. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

After an hour, the students poured out into the hallway. They merged with groups from other classrooms and swarmed across the quad toward the basement of Lyons Hall and the dining facility that they would soon enough be calling the Rat, for a faculty/student reception. Counting graduate students and enrollees at the Woods College of Advancing Studies, there are more than 400 new international students at Boston College this fall, and the long buffet lines leading to egg rolls, chicken fingers, and other savories wound slowly around the dining hall. Students snuck glances at one another’s nametags and chatted. After 48 hours on campus, freshman Mai Fujii of Japan said she was finding two aspects of U.S. college life disconcerting: the friendliness of American students and the food portions, which “are really big.”

Lima Kondo of Tokyo, who is spending her junior year here, said that, at first, everyone she saw on campus reminded her of characters from American television shows. “They were all talking on their phones,” she laughed, and “people moved very quickly.” Kondo, who described her home university in Tokyo as “really bureaucratic,” said she was enjoying the “informal” nature of the orientation.

Akshay Tandon ’12, who came to the Carroll School from Hong Kong, surveyed the scene as students, many in flip-flops, flitted among dozens of conversation clumps. Small posses banded together to approach one or another of the professors and administrators who smiled benevo-lently at them from the round lunch tables. “At home, people are a bit xenophobic,” Tandon mused. “Here, they’re really open.”

James Skerrett, the Australian in Gentilella’s class, discerned another dif-ference between Boston College and his home academic culture. “In Australia, we’re not that passionate about our university,” he said. “Here, people are really proud to go to BC.” He paused, as if searching for the right word. “It’s like patriotism,” he said.

Alison Lobron is a writer in the Boston area.