Hi everybody! I'm from India and thinking about doing my MBA in the US. There's a lot of rhetoric right now about how everything is heating up in the country there with Trump and all that, and I am curious about if this mentality is also in business schools and MBA programs.

I know it's a big country and there are a lot of variations between places and schools but I want to have a good understanding of what I am getting into if I decide to do this. Any advice or real world experiences would be appreciated!!

Its easy to focus everything on a person (Trump) and pinpoint him as a reason. Is there discrimination at work place, US school? - Yes.
But the same can be said for literally every country - statistically speaking of course. If you actually stop watching the news, the world would appear perfectly normal to you.

I have talked at length about my experience / class profile in my earlier posts. Feel free to search for that. In a class of 120, I think I had 2-3 people who thought they were superior, but then they influenced 10-12 people easily.

It's not fair to generalize the whole country - specially a big one like US. Think more about the H1B program and how companies are becoming extremely selective. A lot will depend on the school that you attend. I mean if you are thinking Harvard, MIT and the likes, then go for it. If you are thinking University of Missouri then it's a hard pass. Anything in between is a roll of dice.

P.S - Me and my wife are moving to Canada this summer as we got our PR. I look forward to this new phase.

When there is much competition, some students will try to look superior and impress, and some may go about it the wrong way. This has nothing to do with country but personality. Indians (since you mentioned them) or anyone else, may have that attitude as well

Still, the vast majority of the students are normal people going about their business and trying to achieve their goals

I would say that as long as you go to a school that regularly recruits international students, this shouldn't really be a problem. I mean, maybe you'll run into issues here and there, but let's face it, discrimination is a worldwide phenomenon, including in places like India.

I'd echo Ayon's advice and target schools that are in diverse communities. The US is a large place, and some parts of that large places are more used to diversity than others.

I think there are people of many different nationalities studying together in the US, so discrimination is not such an obvious concern there. During my years of study in the US, I met a lot of people even from our political foes, but I made friends with most of them, so I think everything will be ok. I think you could check out whether there are some policies against discrimination at the University you are going to apply.

[Edited by Narine on Apr 03, 2018]

I was an exchange student at UCLA and Dartmouth College, and travel regularly in the US. The important discrimination in the US is the legal discrimination that underpins the visa system. Ordinary Americans don't know too much truth about the rest of the world, but they are generally polite and generous even if they hold somewhat racist views. Certainly, I would be cautious about going to college in a very poor, conservative, fundamentalist, white area of the USA like Appalachia. However the biggest arguments against going to study in the USA is that the very low odds of gaining a visa without marriage make it a risky investment in comparison to Canada, Australia, Singapore or even (if you take a year first to learn the language) mainland Europe.