Her Campus USC’s Staff Writer Michaela Hewitt was accepted into the Global Opportunities (GO) Program at North Dakota State University for this semester and has decided to blog about her trip for us!
Michaela shares a snapshot of her first week in the States:
Michaela:
I’m staying in a dorm because I thought it would be a great way to meet people and experience typical American college life! My dorm hall is one of the newer buildings on campus (yay for air-con!) and has an apartment-style setting. Each apartment has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, plus a decent sized kitchen and lounge area. There are four students in each apartment, but they keep boys and girls separate, which is quite different from Unicentral and Varsity at USC. Sharing my bedroom is an Italian and in the other room are two American locals.
As a part of Orientation we were taken on a campus tour led by a student volunteer, who later took me and three other friends to a small town called Barnesville in Minnesota where they were having a Potato Fair! The town is only home to a couple of thousand people, but thousands more came in to have potato sack races, shop the markets and eat potatoes in hundreds of different ways! It was very much a country town! We had dinner (meatballs and mashed potato) and listened to a live band play country music! She also took me and another exchange student out to a dinner to have thickshakes because it was buy-one-get-one-free night! If you study abroad, definitely find a local who knows important things like this!
I have the seven day meal plan which means I can go to any dining centre on campus whenever I want. On the weekends only one dining centre is open, but during the weeks we have access to any of the three with our ID card. Each location has a salad bar, sandwich bar, drinks and other snacks available at any time, plus a few different hot meal options for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
One weekend a friend and I checked out the Wellness Centre, which had a sort of “open day” after lunch. The centre houses the on-campus medical clinic, basketball, volleyball and racquetball courts plus a huge gym that puts on group classes! The cool thing is students get to use these facilities for free! There was a variety of stations set up around the centre and we had to run around finding them all and learning about the facilities and get a card signed at each booth. After we had visited each one and joined in on a Zumba class, we got a free T-shirt! We also tried out the rock climbing wall (that’s right, they have a rock climbing wall on campus!) and I was so excited because I managed to get to the top. They said it was one of the harder ones!
There was a welcome party one evening which involved jumping castles, basketball and bungee trampolines, plus a dance floor and popcorn and fairy floss! My friends and I went after we had dinner and stayed for a few hours, but it was so hot! We’re soaking up the heat though because we know it won’t stick around! This week has been around 32-38 degrees Celsius, which the locals tell us doesn’t happen this late in the summer! I’m bracing for the snow when it comes in about November!
Until next time,
Michaela!