“The right thing to do” : COVID-19 emergency work as a migration experience for the international health care students of Hungary

Abstract: The case study of this thesis is the analysis of international health care students joined the emergency call of local authorities and performed emergency work during COVID-19 to help the Hungarian health care teams and facilities manage the pandemic. Through this case, the thesis puts an existing student interaction typology (Rose-Redwood and Rose-Redwood, 2013) to the test, and sets out to answer how the COVID-19-induced changes in their typology affected the students’ experience of being a migrant in Hungary. With semi-structured interviews and an inductive approach, the thesis identifies three recurring feelings – isolation, gratitude and responsibility – and the core argument of the thesis is that the feelings and migration experiences that the student shared were connected to the disruption of the student interaction typology. This study informs our understanding of student mobility and helps further research account for atypical situations in student mobility research.