I am officially done with my last final of my sophomore year. I think I am experiencing a mid-college-life crisis thinking that it wasn’t too long since I first got here, and yet it’s only going to be this much longer until they kick me out of this wonderful place. But I know that you, incoming freshmen, have a lot more exciting things to look forward to than how you might feel tomorrow in two years. So I’m not going to make this a philosophical discussion of inner self-analysis trying to discover what my place in the world is right now or educated abstractions of this sort.
I’d rather imagine that I’m just like you, an incoming freshman again, super excited to make it to the biggest adventure of my life: going to college in a different country.You probably heard everything about the great parts of coming to the University of Richmond, otherwise you wouldn’t have accepted. And if you are an international student, you must have heard that going to college in a different country is going to take you some adjustment. But back when I was surfing the Internet like crazy to get some feeling about how my life is going to be over the next few years, I did not find too much about what exactly I had to adjust. So now I decided to share with you some of the stuff that I found different, or that were harder for me because I didn’t know how to deal with them.
Of course, it highly depends from person to person, as well as from culture to culture, and how much you have already been exposed to anything US-related. I must have been an extreme case, because I was raised in a very different culture, in a pretty traditional Romanian family, who never even remotely considered going to another country for any other purpose than visiting. In addition, my parents don’t speak English nor know anything about US culture other than what is portrayed in movies, and neither do 99% of the other people important in my life before I came here. I am also coming from a totally different school system, which emphasizes totally different skills.
Before going on, I should also mention the textbook version of the stages of adjustment to a different culture that I kept on hearing the summer before coming here. At first you are very excited about everything new that surrounds you, you love it and nothing can seem less perfect! Then at some point you get homesick, miss home like crazy, and sometimes start feeling lonely when you realize that nobody really understands you because of your background. In the final stage, you found a balance: you are over homesickness, but you are not as excited about everything as when you first came, because now they are familiar. There is also the reverse shock, when you go home over breaks after getting used to a different culture, and armed with a new way of thinking. You are seeing your own culture in a different light, and after being educated about how great the US culture is, you may not like what you see. And because you formed different opinions while abroad, they may be different than those of your loved ones back home.
Now, a few very concrete details from my own experiences, particularly very early ones, that I can still recollect:
- That’s the way you do things here? When I first came, and I was meeting new people, they probably found me kissing them on a cheek as awkward as I found the hugs I kept getting. It took me a while to figure out that when in Romania you kiss someone on a cheek as a sign of friendship, saying goodbye, good luck or whatever, people here give hugs instead.
- I know English and I know what 2+2 equals, but… I didn’t realize I didn’t know how to say 2+2 in English until I sat in my first science class (which was IQS). After a brief introduction, we did math. It was all simple math review, and the class was very interactive. I was able to understand everything that was going on because science terminology is similar enough in all languages, but I realized that I can’t participate, because I couldn’t express my math thinking in English! I think it was in the second or third week when I finally dared to say aloud something science-related in IQS. I was so proud of myself that day! The good part is that science terminology is similar enough and my feel for the English language is good enough for a foreigner, that one month since school started, I didn’t have any communication problems in science (on the condition that I already heard the word in English at least once before).
- Is that a comma? No, it’s a dot! I remember the first homework I ever got in college, which came from IQS. It was a very challenging math homework. One reason is that I had to be very careful because I knew that the US and Romania use commas and dots in opposite ways when writing numbers. I was confused as to when to use a dot and when a comma, and I sometimes scratched a dot to make a comma, then scratched it back to a dot, and my paper was a mess. (in Romania, the comma is used as a decimal separator and the dot as a thousand separator - this was the only Math difference I was aware of, because the calculators we use in Romania are not made especially for us, so they use dots to separate decimals).
- But it was not supposed to be challenging at all! I’m talking about the same homework! One of the 10ish problems was to graph two functions. So I thought about the entire half of semester we spent on how to properly graph functions in my advanced math high school class. I started calculating for each of them minimums and maximums, inflexion points and some other special points I don’t even remember anymore, giving some random values to get more points on the graph, and doing other stuff that I learned in high school I had to do to graph a function properly. Graphing functions is the most time-consuming exercise in Romanian calculus classes. As I got to school the next day, I saw some random, approximate graphs on my colleague’s papers. “Where are your calculations for the graph?” “What calculations? We just had to sketch some graphs!” It took me a while to understand that they were using graphic calculators (something I hadn’t seen before coming to the US) and that in the US, nobody cares about teaching you how to spend hours graphing a function when a calculator (or a program like Mathematica) can do it for you. I wish I knew that before spending all that time graphing!
- I could probably see the connection between baseball and econ if I knew what baseball was! I loved how my econ teacher taught us everything starting from real-life based examples. In the second week of school, we had this example about baseball. It seemed to make sense to everybody since they were all nodding and asking questions, but I didn’t understand anything. That’s because I know nothing about baseball. A few weeks ago, at the Academic Skills Center someone asked me for help with that problem, and not even now did I know how to do it, because I still don’t know anything about baseball.
- I’m great at chemistry! Really? We started adding chemistry to IQS a little later than the other subjects. Before our chemistry class, our professor gave us a diagnosis test, to see how much chemistry we knew already. I knew how to solve every single problem, but my professor didn’t understand most of what I did. She saw that I got the right answer, but she didn’t get how I got there. As it turns out, the standard way every chemist in Romania solves general chemistry problems, from those who just heard about atoms to my research advisor from Bucharest, is unheard of in the US. And I couldn’t imagine doing chemistry without that method. It took me a while to figure out the way in which general chemistry problems are solved in the US, a longer while than just learning how to speak scientific English.
- That’s not a D! that’s an s! Now the first IQS test that has chemistry in it comes along. We had this exercise where we were supposed to draw and label s, p, and d orbitals. I was sure I did it perfectly, but I saw I had lost half a point, and I couldn’t get why. Why do I have the letter s cut and written s on top of it??? As it turns out, my professor believed that my little letter s was actually a big D, and she assumed that I believed that my drawing represented a d orbital instead of an s orbital. My inside got outraged: taking points off for handwriting only happens with communist-minded professors I was trying to avoid by coming to school in the US. I didn’t understand at first what was going on. It took me a long conversation with my Romanian Physics professor to get that people in the US never learn how to write cursively anymore, so it’s good enough that they understand most of the other letters. (You may not even know what I’m talking about, so here it is! Notice the little s). Of course, as soon as the professor understood that I meant s, I got my half point back, so everything was ok, except that I learned an important lesson: cursive handwriting is dying! Actually two. The other one was, change your little s urgently! And I did!
- Who cares about Thanksgiving? But I want my Easter back! All Americans pity me when they find that I stay on campus for Thanksgiving break. I don’t! Thanksgiving is this nice American holiday that I am happy to experience as part of fully embracing a new culture. But I don’t feel any need to be with my family on Thanksgiving. If I were with my family in Romania, I would probably not care at all, because Romanians don’t celebrate anything on that day. In Romania, or at least in my extended family, there are two big family holidays: Christmas and Easter. For Christmas, I get to be home. For Easter, I get to be…studying! Here in the US, this year I had my first final on Easter Monday morning, so I had to spend my Easter studying. Back home, we used to have somewhat between 4 days and 2 weeks of Easter break, and I was celebrating it in the village of one of my grandmothers, with my Mom’s extended family, or with my Dad’s extended family, or sometimes we were going to both in the same day. My family is still doing all that, only that I am not there anymore. Talking to them on the phone and hearing them happy together makes me feel even worse. That is, not to mention the lack of Romanian Orthodox churches in Virginia, and the lack of traditional Easter food. Easter is officially the day when I feel most homesick.
- Speaking of homesickness! This homesickness aspect varies a lot! I have met Romanians (not from UR) who went back after a few months or a semester because they were too homesick. I met others who were at first counting the days until going home, but eventually didn’t go home at all. I have also met Romanians who go home just because the parents almost force them to, otherwise they wouldn’t. I don’t think I fit into any category, rather I have my own. I am usually too busy to be homesick. Most of the time, I am busy enough by default, that I don’t get to think too much of what I left behind. I guess that makes me less homesick than most people. I have come to the conclusion that the busier I am, the less I think about home, and therefore the less homesick I am. The only exception is when something exterior suddenly brings home back to my mind, such as neighbors speaking in Romanian to someone other than me. Even in those cases, the solutions are 1) wake up parents in the middle of the night with a phone call and cry telling that you feel lonely and miss them (only happened once) and 2) add 10 more things to do to make yourself so busy, that you can’t even hear what’s going on in the world.
- Nobody believes how busy I am! I usually don’t need to make myself busy though! Studying in the best higher education system never comes for free, even when you get a scholarship that covers all your expenses! It costs you time! And friendships with people from home who don’t get that you are literally too busy to talk to them! I know it sounds terrible, and before I came here, I refused to believe that my friends were too busy to talk to me, until I did come and saw that 1) I didn’t lose their friendship and 2) I became as busy as they claimed to be. I come from a culture where students have a lot of free time, probably more than ever, and some of my friends from home simply do not understand that somewhere else it can be different.
- Did I say I know English? I take it back! Ok, to close in the same way I began, and in the same time with something very recent. I think I mentioned that this semester I took Physics with a Romanian professor. She told me at some point that if I can’t understand something during a test because it’s in English, I can ask her, since other international students who didn’t even share another language have asked her before. I did not need to ask her though, until the final came around. I was so close! But I didn’t want to risk a lower grade in Physics because of my English. The idea of this story is that no matter how great your English is, there will always be a word or something you can’t understand. Yes, there are ways to figure out from the context, but sometimes you have to figure out the context based on that word! Like in an exam! If something like that happens, don’t be afraid to say so! UR professors are too nice to mind a question for clarification.
This post is not meant to make you change your mind about coming to this great university. I just wanted to give you an idea of some things that shouldn’t take you by surprise when adapting to a new culture. I do not feel like copying the rest of my blog here to remind you again of how happy I am for being where I am. However, if someone tells you that something is perfect, it’s pretty sure he’s lying, and I don’t want to lie.To all of you out there, have a happy summer, and get excited to join the Spiders! I’ll say hi again in the fall!
