International students travel in many ways. First of all geographically: they move from one country to another. Secondly, they travel through their own identities: they have to find a new place in a new context by familiarizing themselves with new values and customs, while making sure they meet the requirements their studies ask of them. Writing an academic text is almost always one of these requirements. Faculty assign their (international) students to write academic texts because they want to know whether or not they comprehend the content of the course they have offered. Some faculty also want to know whether or not students have familiarized themselves with academic genres and conventions, which may vary according to country or discipline. Consequently, when faculty ask international students to write an academic text, they are requiring them to undertake yet a third journey. In the process, international students may travel through a variety of genre conventions, exploring the conventions of their host country in combination with the conventions in their (new) discipline. In addition to these travels, they also have to find their own voices and their own identities while writing a text. Often, when they receive papers that they consider unsatisfactory, faculty assume that international students' capacities in academic writing are deficient. In this article, we will show how the design of two academic writing workshops for an international and interdisciplinary masters' program helped students in their interdisciplinary and international writing processes, not by working from a deficiency model, but by working from a contextual model. We will present the results in the conclusion by way of a pedagogical rough guide for teaching academic writing to international students.