This chapter focuses on the theme of agency, investigating how the nine international students in the research responded to academic, sociocultural, and financial challenges that they encountered in their new environment. The idea of challenge provides context for the analysis, but the primary emphasis is not on how these students struggled—a recurring theme in the literature on international students—but rather on what they did in response to challenges. Building on the work of other scholars in international education who emphasize the need to attend to student agency, I argue for the importance of seeing international students not as passive recipients of local structural forces but rather as active agents who continuously seek out ways to pursue their own interests. Data presented throughout the chapter provide basis for this claim.