The first week on a university campus can be exciting, but it can be daunting for some foreign students.

Dasol Oluge came to Canada from Nigeria last year.

"I was a little bit taken aback, first of all because I didn't know anybody," said the second-year engineering student.

Besides feeling isolated, Oluge says navigating campus was toughest for him.

"It was quite stressful trying to find my way around following the procedures of how to register myself, register my classes," he told CBC News.

More than 2,600 international students attend the University of Calgary, roughly eight per cent of the student population.

In addition to dealing with loneliness, unfamiliar surroundings and paperwork, many face a language barrier too.

Sarah Nunes has studied how international students cope with back-to-school stress.

“Students basically had to reframe a lot of the challenges into something positive and something they could work with so they viewed them as challenges they could overcome; they viewed them as opportunities to prepare for the future,” Nunes said.

The information from her study will be given to staff at the university's counselling centre.

"So we want psychologists to be in the know about the stressors so they can help them and students can have a good experience in one on one counselling."

Nunes hopes this will prompt more foreign students to seek help if they're really in need.

For his part, Dasoloa Oluge says he quickly learned the importance of asking questions.

"Let go of my shyness and those kinds of things because I had to survive,” he explained. “I had only one week to finish up registration so it was not a time to be afraid of asking questions."