Iowa State University has a prominent international student population coming from other countries all around the world and sometimes those students don’t always get the most warm welcome.

Earl Hur, a senior in statistics and a student assistant at the international students, has dual citizenship in the United States and in South Korea. He’s not an international student, but he is a foreign born student.

Hur had moved into an apartment in Campustown recently that was not cleaned and had no shower head, among other things.

“The roof over the bathtub was too low to actually stand up in,“ Hur said. “They didn’t show me the apartment before I moved into the place.”

The apartment managers rejected a request for Hur to walk through his apartment before he moved in.

Campustown eventually changed the shower head, Hur said, but other problems have yet to be fixed.

“Maybe they thought I do not quite understand their English,” Hur said. “I don’t if there is some kind of discrimination for the international students or not, but there could be.”

Hur said he is planning to move out of the apartment at the end of the semester.

He went to the student legal office and there was nothing they were able to do to help him.

“Generally Iowa’s a pretty friendly place,” said Tzer Shyang Chin, senior in mechanical engineering and president of International Student Ambassadors. Chin is an international student from Malaysia.

Chin has been in Iowa for two and a half years and hasn’t experienced discrimination from any of the faculty.

“The only discrimination you might get is possibly through employers,” Chin said. “If you actually sit down and take a look and just observe them, you understand what I mean when I say there’s some discrimination they kind of change their tone whenever they’re talking to an international student.”

The international students and scholars office (ISSO) rarely hears about discrimination of international students.

“For some reason those things are not reported to us and very rarely do we hear about them if we hear about them of course we do what we can,” said Deb Vance, interim director of the International students and scholars office.

The ISSO works as an advocate for international students at Iowa State University.

“Primarily we’re the only office on campus that helps people navigate the immigration regulations that apply to them and one to fail is to not comply with those regulation and then you’re not legally in the country,” Vance said. “That’s a large large part of our job because it’s something that only we can do.”

The ISSO doesn’t work with international students academically.

“We’re not academic advisors in anyway, shape or form,” Vance said.

Recently, ISSO has started a class to help introduce international students to American culture. University studies 110x is a class international students can take to help them adapt.

The ISSO’s goal is to create an environment where international students can interact with American students and integrate with the community.

“Because you come all this way for an education and if you never mix with the local culture and the local people you might as well have gotten that education at home,” Vance said.

International students have financial burdens as well.

They pay out of state tuition in all cases except for graduate assistance. Along with tuition international students have to document sufficient financial resources to cover their tuition and living expenses their whole time here in order to be admitted because immigration regulations.

If you are not a U.S. citizen or a resident in this country you are not going to get student loans or government assistance.

“There’s no safety net for you,” Vance said.

Some students have a scholarship from their country and often their parents send salary statements so the institution can document it.

The ISSO thinks the more international students and American students can get together the better the relations will become and fewer misunderstandings can happen.

Iowa State University has a vast international student population from different cultures and with different backgrounds. Those students are transferred from their own environment to Ames. A community, with a University, that was founded 1864 and has a population of 63,266. 11.2 percent of the population of Ames is foreign born, according the last census.

Iowa State University had an enrollment of 36,001 as fall 2015. There are 2138 international students going for their undergraduate degree currently at Iowa State.