What is the best advice you could give a prospective international student?

I'm working as an academic coach for students who are living overseas, mostly in Asia, and are planning to come to the US to study. These student range in age from middle school kids planning to earn a BA here to older businessmen working toward an MBA. If you are an international student or have experience working with them, what would be the most important piece of advice you could give them? What do you wish you had known before you came here? What would you do differently? If you had the opportunity to go back in time and give yourself advice before coming here, what would you say?





Thanks for any help you can offer to my students and me!!! :)What is the best advice you could give a prospective international student?
I've worked with several in your latter category. By far, the most common trait is their underestimation of communicating in English. Americans especially tend to under-emphasize the spoken language. We talk simply, but write complicated essays and correspondence. Most international students understand the material, have little to no problems reading the material, but when the write a graduate level essay or thesis, they do very poorly compared to their previous work; and that hurts them.