thanks benoit for this submit :Life at Penn through the eyes of an exchange student
Going to a foreign country is always a great experience, but when you are an exchange student, you do something more than the tourists do: you don’t just study the way people live, you really try to live as they do. This, in my opinion, is a necessary condition to a truly enriching year abroad. As a French exchange student, I spent a lot of time at the bgeinning of the year getting over the amazing differences between French and American culture. The first shock was the food, particularly when I had a roommate who liked eating bananas with sliced so-called ‘cheese’. As a Frenchman, I am used to fresh fine cheeses, such as Roquefort (the one with blue pieces of mold) or real cheddar, instead of processed cheddar-flavored compact slices. I understand that Americans must think it crazy to eat cheese with fungus, but I can’t judge them as a country on the basis of the cheese they eat. It just goes to stress the difference. In the beginning I tried to stay away from these exploding cocktails of flavors, but the middle of the semester found me waiting in line at Burger King. I even went as far as being able to distinguish a Whopper from a Big Mac. To make the situation even stranger, my other roommate was from India and made frequent use of strange-smelling and often powerful spices, often using me as a guinea pig for his recipes.
Studying in an American university also provided part of the cultural shock. First, I was surprised by the average number of credits and course hours Penn has. At the University of Technology of Compiegne (where I am from), students usually take seven courses a semester, with 4 to 6 hours per week for each course, instead of the five courses with 3 to 5 hours a week that we have here. However, at Penn, we have to submit a lot of homework in comparison. On the other hand, the amount of homework submitted at the UTC is less because students have to study by themselves without being obliged to give back many reports or assignments. A big advantage of the system at Penn is that we are forced to study continually during the semester and so avoid the precipitation of studies the day before the exams.