We encounter them every day, passing between classes, on the bus or even out on the weekends. It is not easy being an international student. Adapting to university life can be difficult, especially when it is in a completely new world. They have all got an interesting story.

Muhammad Aurang Zaib is one of them. He goes by Zaib with his friends, and he is come here all the way from Pakistan. He is one a select few of his peers who were given the opportunity to study in the United States.

He is sharply dressed and immediately friendly. His dark brown eyes betray a smile, even during the rare moments when there is not one on his face.

He is studying agronomy, and he does not like the cold. He is one of the 3,424 international students of the 29,887 students at Iowa State University.

Zaib will be graduating with a master’s degree this spring and hopes to find an assistantship so he can get his Ph.D. He is a successful student, but getting here was not easy. Not everyone takes education for granted, especially Zaib.

“Sometimes I think of how lucky I am, studying at Iowa State in the agronomy department — one of the top departments in the U.S.,” Zaib said. “I personally studied in a school in Pakistan with no walls.”

Zaib attended a small school in the Punjab region of rural Pakistan. His school was different from schools here in the United States. His school had no walls, floors or even rooms and class was held outdoors. As a matter of fact, in summer, students sat in the shade under a tree while it was well over 100 degrees. In the winter, they huddled together while they studied.

“How should I describe the color of the water in my hometown?” he chuckles as he remembers his hometown and what his life was like growing up. “There was no drinking water. There was no medical facility, no transport. We used to walk a lot to school.”

He did not let that stop him. He still studied 18 hours a day he joked, even though his home was provided with electricity for less than six.

Zaib is one of four children in his family, he and his two sisters and brother were raised by his parents, both of which are teachers. According to Zaib, although teachers are held in high regard in Pakistan, they do not make a sufficient amount of money, and his family struggled greatly. However, his parents worked hard to educate him and put him through school.

“I feel proud for my parents,” Zaib said. “Even though they were school teachers and did not have enough earning for food, for clothing or for education, but they did a very good job.”

Despite the fact that his school did not have adequate facilities or textbooks, he continued to work hard until he made it to college, where he interacted with a computer for the first time.

The state of universities in Pakistan is in a steep decline given the current economic and political situation within the country. The weak central government is exacerbated by frequent bombings and overpopulation within the cities, further devouring the already thinly-spread resources.

The country has been stricken with natural disasters like the massive flood in July of 2010 and unrest due to conflict in Afghanistan. U.S. presence in the area has increasingly put pressure in the Pakistani government and armed forces.

According to the U.S. Department of state, Pakistan is currently struggling due to an imbalance of government funding, stating that “the events of September 11, 2001, and Pakistan’s agreement to support the United States led to a waiver of the sanctions, and military assistance resumed to provide spare parts and equipment to enhance Pakistan’s capacity to police its western border with Afghanistan and address its legitimate security concerns.”

According to Zaib, due to a porous border between the countries, people are able to travel between the countries, allowing terrorists to flow into the country and facilitate attacks such as suicide bombings. The federal government has to spend significant amounts of resources in counterterrorism and security rather than internal development projects, specifically education.

It is the students who suffer and insufficient education could be a major contributor to underdevelopment within the country.

“On a bigger level, the education, the schooling system, the medical, everything is disturbed,” Zaib said. “They don’t have the funding to sponsor the students for higher education.”

There is little money for individuals like Zaib to pursue their education, and not only are students suffering with the burden, Pakistani universities are struggling not just to gather funding, but even to keep their doors open.

“When you don’t have money, what will the progress be?” Zaib said. “How much will people be interested actually? To teach? To do the research? So when you don’t have the money, there’s nothing good going on.”

It is difficult for students to pursue a higher education, and the poor state of education leaves the government few options.

“It’s hard,” Zaib said. “Before, the conditions were not that bad, but the conditions are getting worse. I don’t know how they are going to fix it, but I hope things get better.”

The Pakistani government has little money to sponsor students for graduate schools or studying abroad, especially those with the humble background like Zaib. However, he continued to work hard. Zaib graduated from Pakistan in 2007 and began applying for graduate schools.

He spent some time working and after several years and then was accepted to Iowa State.

“It’s hard for a student, a guy who’s studying in a school or college or university and his dream is to get a higher education as my dream was, because I’m not from a very developed city,” he said.

Despite his rural background and education, he was accepted. It was not easy for him, dealing with immigration from a country like Pakistan can be difficult, but he was soon off to the US.

“If you want to go out of your country you have to face a lot of problems,” Zaib said. “So all of these things, the screening test makes it harder for Pakistani students.”

Fortunately, he was one of the lucky few of his friends that made it abroad to study.

“There were hundreds of students from my university, a lot of my friends really wished that they could have got admission and a visa for the U.S.A. or Europe,” Zaib said. “A lot of my friends did apply, but they were rejected.”

Fast-forward a few years to Zaib’s time at Iowa State where he is studying agronomy and currently working on adapting different types of corn to Iowa’s climate. He even has his own field of crops.

Zaib made a life for himself, and despite struggling at first, he has overcome the challenge of beginning a new life and is doing well.

International students have lots of problems to deal with. Not only do they have trouble wading through application forms, visa restrictions and the logistical nightmare of moving across the world to study, it is not always easy to adapt to a completely new life in a different world.

Ali Soltanshahi is a program coordinator for international students at Iowa State and is in charge of helping them get to Iowa State while guiding them along in their education. According to Soltanshahi, one of the most significant problems for students is culture shock, which can be detrimental to their education.

“Basically, the idea is that students will go through culture shock,” Soltanshahi said. “They’re excited at first, but then they realize that here, they have different values than their home country.”

It can be extremely difficult for students to deal with a new life at Iowa State. Being thousands of miles from home can be disorienting, and college is difficult enough when becoming lost among a sea of students.

“Often times, they don’t find a mentor that validates them-a mentor that hears their story,” Soltanshahi said.

Fortunately for Zaib, he has found a mentor, and a friend.

“When I met Zaib, I don’t think I really got to know anyone from Pakistan, and there’s so much that I want to learn from him, but I can say that we could all benefit from meeting Zaib,” said Emily Heaton, assistant professor in Agronomy “He’s a great ambassador for his country, I wish more people knew him. We need to be more open to hosting students like him”

Emily oversees his work and works directly with him in his graduate studies. Zaib is currently trying to identify specific new varieties that are better suited to Iowa’s environment, hoping to bring what he has learned here back to Pakistan to improve the conditions and increase farmers’ crop yields.

“He’s a lot of fun to work with,” Heaton said. “He’s really outgoing, and he’s sort of a sponge for new cultures and people. He has an amazing capacity to get to know people and meet people.”

Zaib applies himself to his studies with hopes that he can continue to do research and study agriculture, eventually leading to a Ph.D. For now, he is rounding out as an agronomist.

“He’s learned what it takes to do a real experiment, understand the stat analysis that goes behind drawing conclusions from that experiment and will be able to determine what is real, and what is an observation.”

What can he take away? Well, he is going home to teach agronomy and improve the conditions back there.

“He’ll be training a new generation of scientists, and the skills he learns will be going to workforce development in Pakistan,” Heaton said.

Zaib is not just a successful student; he successfully adapted and made a life for himself here in the United States. He even branches out to help others deal with adapting to their new lives in the United States.

“He’s a very helpful individual,” said his friend Umair Ilyas, senior in electrical engineering. “That’s the case with me, and that’s the case with his other friends as well, and that’s irrespective of which background they come from. Whether that’s from the United states, whether they’re an international student from some other place, whether they’re fellow Pakistanis, he has a helpful attitude toward them.”

Ilyas described Zaib as “like a big brother,” who has helped him with everything from learning to cook, coming up with better study habits and even advising Ilyas when purchasing a car.

“He’s a really good friend. I look up to him for difficult matters,” Ilyas said.

Zaib continues to be outgoing and make friends and is not intimidated by new experiences or people.

“I have a couple of very very good American friends here now,” Zaib said. “I think that if I could have a lot of Pakistani students, I could not have maybe stayed away from those people. I now have a lot of American friends.”

He did not let cultural or social barriers stop him. As a matter of fact, he is happy now and is proud of his ability to adapt.

“This was the only way I can get settled, I can come out of the culture shock I had. I think I did a good job,” he said.

Now, he is just looking forward to graduating, continuing on to his Ph.D. and returning home.

“I really want to do something in agriculture,” Zaib said. “Do something for my people. That really inspired me.”

But first, he has some work to do.

“Still, I need to work a lot to develop my skills here,” he said.