you'll disgust me if you do. you pay thousands, millions of ringgit to fly overseas to hang out with malaysians. you wanna do that you stay in malaysia... wasting money.

why does feeling disgust for such people mean I'm white-washed? As it is, a lot of Malaysians like to say they studied overseas ... but all their friends are Malaysian. Why did you go overseas then? Where are your multi-cultural, multi-racial friends that aren't Malaysian?

That parts really applies only to a very small fraction of colleges in US which have foreign students in it. And even in very good schools who have some or all of those, only a small number of students make use of these academic opportunities. I've been in a class with less than 30 people and they don't even know the lecturer's name. So I think immersion into the culture is as important as realizing one's academic goals. Even research professors know that academia is only half the story. I really don't see how it's secondary. American Education is only 'high quality' if one makes use of all the resources and making use of the resources is inseparable from building relationships with Americans. You don't learn much by just sitting in the lecture, you learn by meeting personally with he lecturer, discussing your ideas, involving yourself with research where you inevitably need to work harmoniously with others. How do you have a good discussion about politics and other social issue without getting to know American culture and how there viewpoints are shaped? By relying on sociology and anthropology textbooks about America? No one gets to use any state of the art equipment unless you're close to a professor. Otherwise you're just using normal equipment that can be found everywhere else. Google doesn't come to campus to give people a project they can do at home on their couch, they hold events, competitions and internships where you'll really need to interact and make friends with the people around you, who are mostly going to be Americans. The culture part is inseparable.

spunkberry may be harsh sometimes, but she's not poking "Malaysian groups", her point is going there and setting up a closed Malaysian village is a not something desirable. There's nothing so special about American culture, it's just their culture, something different, a different way of life people ascribe themselves too. A way of life that shapes their perspective of the world.  A way of life that has produced a great nation. Do you think all their achievements today came from simply being in a land that became to be known as America? Their culture did produce some grad dreams and their culture pushed them into making those dreams a reality. That success made them what they are today. It's ingrained into their culture. There's good and bad to it, some with out Malaysian culture. Knowledge can be found in any book, but culture is what pushes the society forward. In business all depend on the culture of the company to keep its employees as a cohesive whole. We can stop being to grand and mighty about our culture. It has it good and bad. It has brought it alot of peace and very much less violence compared to many places in the world. But our economy can do much better, we can become a stronger political power and out culture is lacking in those drives. So we learn and bring back difference aspect of foreign culture that is beneficial to the field we are in. Alone it's a very small piece, but a whole of all the Malaysia who study overseas and bring back their small bit, it can create a big effect. Look at Japan, from being a totally closed country, it open up to various foreign culture that it saw was beneficial to them and adapted they way of life. Yet they still remain distinctively Japanese. We don't have to lose out identity by assimilating with Americans for a few years. Being friends with all the Malaysians you can find on campus is a totally different thing with forming a closed group with only Malaysia and being so timid about venturing out. There's a difference between having 100 best friends who are Malaysian and having only 100 friends who are all Malaysia. It's not about putting whites or blacks about anyone, it's about including them in our circle of friends.

If the greatness of American education is attending lectures, taking test and staining some bacteria red and basking in the great things one's university has but never participated in, then it's simply no different from reading a textbook quietly in one's room. Does listening to a Harvard professor and then using the latest DNA spectrometry machine automatically make a person do great things in the future?