Hello again! I hope all is well with you. I am most certainly doing well at Penn State University! During my first two weeks here, I have been meeting lots of people and enjoying my time here! I was finally united with my Southampton friend, who I met on Facebook through the Study Abroad group before I came here. Her name is Prudence and she is here for a year to do geophysics. I also met a number of exchange students from universities all around the world, which has been very exciting! I finally moved in from my temporary accommodation to my permanent accommodation and met my roommate! I can tell you that all of these had been fun, and at the same time, exhausting!
The International Students Orientation (ISO) programme is designed for international students to settle down, learn about the American culture and some house rules, and make new friends. International students were assigned into (American) football teams and these are basically orientation groups. The orientation sessions are simply mixtures of some fundamental (and inevitably boring) topics such as insurance, banking and the Code of Conduct, and some (surprisingly) fun stuff like acting in a play and team huddle activity.
It is but the boring bits that I learnt the most from! Everyone living in the USA must have a health insurance, and it can be very costly. I paid approximately $1,400 for a semester’s insurance (oh how much I miss the NHS!), and Penn State have their own set of requirements in terms of insurance, which were designed to ensure that students and their families are fully supported in the unfortunate events of an illness, or death.
Banking in the USA is a different business compared to banking in the UK. There are a few local banks in State College, with the largest one being PNC, which has quite a presence in the east coast. As they have quite a number of ATMs on the campus, I quickly opened a bank account with them. Those who have lived or are living in the UK would know that you can withdraw money from any ATMs for free using your British bank card (unless otherwise stated). That is not the case in the USA as there is a charge to use another bank’s ATM.
Apart from banking, there are a number of things that are done differently here compared to how they are done in the UK. It has never occurred to be that Americans use a different standard for paper size (the ‘letter’ size). Apart from a few sheets of A4 documents I brought over with me, every piece of paper I have seen follows this weird format, which is apparently used in quite a number of countries.
The UK and the USA are ‘two nations divided by a common language’, as everyone would know. Having lived in the UK for quite a few years, I have picked up a bit of the British ways of speaking. I often get strange looks when I greet friends with ‘You alright?’, and ‘cheers!’ has occasionally slipped off my mouth instead of ‘thank you’. I also have to get used to the different units of measurement. In my engineering classes, sometimes American units are used instead of the SI units (such as feet, pounds, etc), but the lecturers are kind enough to occasionally point out what the equivalent SI units would be. I have been trying to get used to using Fahrenheit when talking about the weather with a friend and my smartphone is my best friend when it comes to unit conversions. Inevitably, I have learnt to use the American format of writing dates (MM/DD/YYYY) which I still find very weird and illogical.
Unlike in British universities, sharing your room with a roommate is common in American universities. Students can apply to have their own rooms as well but this would obviously cost them much more. I finally met my roommate, Adam, who is a junior (3rd year student) majoring in electrical engineering. We got along very well, and did I tell you he owns a television?! (and of course, you don’t need a TV licence to watch live television in the USA) The university halls of residence are all on the campus, which makes travelling to my lectures an easy task. However, I sometimes underestimate the sheer size of the University Park campus (which I think is about 3-4 times bigger than Southampton’s Highfield Campus) as I once found myself racing across the campus to a lecture theatre – a knackering walk/run which took me 18 minutes on a hot summer day. Luckily, I made it to the lecture just when it started.
At Penn State, the student ID card is very important. All on-campus residents are required to purchase a meal plan and meal dollars are loaded onto the card, which can be used in different dining commons in different halls complexes across the campus. LionCash, loaded separately onto the card, can be used to get discounts in participating shops and restaurants both on-campus and off-campus. Rather than having to worry about having enough change for laundry, I’ve been using my ID card to pay for my laundry (which is very cheap compared to laundry in Southampton halls – $1.50 for using the washing machine and $0.50 for using the dryer).
I mentioned Denny’s in my last post. For the past few weeks I have been exploring the American cuisine and I can tell you that there are quite a few nice places to eat. The different dining commons on campus have their unique selling points. It is known universally that the cookies in West halls are the most awesome, and Pollock (just a few minutes walk away from my room) has the fanciest dining common on campus. If you ask anyone in Southampton about a good ice-cream parlour, you will probably be told to go to Sprinkles. Here in Penn State, the university have their own creamery and their ice-creams are just so tasty! The ‘Berkey Creamery’ is the university’s ice-cream parlour but their ice-creams can be commonly found in dining commons and on-campus convenience stores. State College may be a small town but its downtown contains a huge variety of restaurants to suit anyone’s taste buds, from Chinese to Mexican – you name it!
That’s all from me for now. I am going to be talking about my classes and my travels so far in the USA in my next blog, so stay tuned!