Back home for a while

So what’s it like studying in America, then? Reminiscing about the end of my first academic year at the Columbia University in New York, I found that my memory keeps several interesting facts about student life for the summer holidays, of which I can boast - that is, should anyone ask me during the summer …

“So what’s it like studying in America, then?”

Reminiscing about the end of my first academic year at the Columbia University in New York, I found that my memory keeps several interesting facts about student life for the summer holidays, of which I can boast – that is, should anyone ask me during the summer …

One of the first things I always recall is our school’s traditions. As far as I have heard, for Czech university students, the pride in belonging to a school is something much less tangible than it is for me. Columbia University is one of the oldest higher education institutions in the US, and though it was founded more than four hundred years later than Charles University, many formal and informal customs have come to life there during its existence.

One of them, called the Orgo Night, is the night before the first of the final exams at the end of every semester (by coincidence, it’s an organic chemistry exam). On that night, students fill the largest room in the university’s main library (Butler Library) on midnight twice a year to listen to the university’s Marching Band (every university has its own band, and ours proudly claims to be the worst in the world), which plays away and inserts scathing jokes about the general happenings at school between songs – the purpose being to make even the biggest bookworms finally stop studying, because by then it’s usually too late anyway. After about an hour of this program, they go on a march throughout the campus, in order to disturb every last student from studying or wake them up from slumber.

Another surprise for a freshman, which I was, is the Primal Scream. As I was falling asleep on a Sunday midnight during the final exams at the end of the fall (sitting at my desk, face down on a chemistry textbook), I suddenly discerned noise outside my windows, which was getting louder as if a crowd of scared people was walking past the campus. But I saw nobody outside when I opened the window. Then I noticed that all other windows of all dorms were open and students, looking out the windows, were simply yelling as loud as they could. They always scream for fifteen to twenty minutes (depending on how desperate the students are due to the ongoing finals), and then they all get back to whatever they were doing before, as if nothing happened.

During the spring semester, the Primal Scream launches another traditional event, the Spring Pillow Fight. About a thousand students gather in front of the university library, another thousand gather opposite in the middle of the campus (by the sun dial), and when everybody starts screaming out the windows, the two groups run towards each other on the grass yelling and start hitting each other with pillows like there was no tomorrow. It’s a great way to vent, and if you dodge the few football players who take the event as an opportunity to practice, you can get away without any major bruises.

There are many traditions like those here, and I will certainly mention some more of them, but we obviously also study at this institution. As in the previous semester, I was lucky to make it onto the Dean’s List (a list of students with excellent academic results – GPA over 3.6), even though I did the very time-consuming lab work, which takes almost a week of preparation, four hours of experiments, and then another week of processing results, every week. As far as my extracurricular activities are concerned, I was offered a paid placement for the next semester from a lab where I have worked as a volunteer so far, so I hope that the American bureaucracy will allow me to use this opportunity even though, as an international student, I must not be paid for any work outside the campus.

So that’s how I look back at the end of my previous semester after more than a month, and I have to admit that I am looking forward to my “Alma Mater”. One more thing that I might add is that, to be frank, I was disappointed to find how few Americans follow the international ice hockey scene. I flew a Czech flag on the day when we sent the US team home from the World Championship – and everybody seemed to not care in the least. But I think they must have been only pretending that the Czech flag wasn’t ringing a bell…

Na chvíli zase doma

More blog articles

All news