Yahoo News Illegal parties, lavish sororities and gruelling classes: how studying in the US was worlds apart from the UK
I'm crouched in the back of a car along with five other students, our limbs splayed in various directions. I'm clutching a red cup in one hand and stifling laughter with the other. We're parked outside a house on Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, which moments before had been full of students, before the police showed up.
We didn’t stay long enough to see them break up the party — the minute people saw flashing blue lights, everyone under the age of 21 dispersed, sprinting out of the back doors and spilling out into the street. I got bundled into a car, hidden. You see, we were 19 and shouldn’t be caught drinking.
These moments of wild parties being ‘busted’ by police could easily be scenes straight out of an American teen rom-com. In fact, most of my time studying abroad for the second year of university felt like a montage of someone living the young, American dream.
It turns out, Oxford Brookes’ partner institute on the east coast of the United States was very different to what I had expected.
Nothing was about the University of Rhode Island was the same as my university at home, right from the day I arrived. When my taxi pulled up on a wide road, with colossal houses either side, I panicked.
"Excuse me, I’m supposed to be getting a taxi to URI, where are we?"
"You’re inside the campus. The address you gave me, that’s the building."
What on Earth? It looked as though we’d pulled up onto Wisteria Lane, not a campus. I would soon learn this is just one part of the uni. There was an entire village worth of such buildings to explore: vast concert arenas, a football stadium larger than my hometown’s football ground, shops, restaurants, a giant green quad in the centre of the university and what felt like an endless number of white stone buildings sprawled across the site.
I often tell people that my experience of spending part of my degree across the pond was the best thing I ever did. Not because I was given a goldfish at the freshers fair rather than a kitchen utensil like at Brookes. It wasn’t because people were obsessed with my accent, though of course it's pleasing to be told you sound like Emma Watson ("Will you say 'Harry Potter' again? Woaah, it’s like having Hermione here, dude"). It wasn't even because dating was so easy, with men brazenly walking over and asking you out for an evening (what, no flirting or decoding of elusive text messages? What is this bold madness?).
No, what sealed the deal for me was the experience of being looked after while I studied. Free from distraction, classes were challenging: professors pressed my opinions on Kerouac, Emerson and Vonnegut and didn’t take shrugs for an answer. Every other day we faced a quiz on previous lessons, so we dare not let any of it fall out of our heads. Yet, somehow it was OK, it was doable, because everything else was taken care of. What luxury!
Cooking? We had a chef. Cleaning? There was a maid service. Shopping? We gave a list of any special requests to the kitchen assistant. Hangovers? It was a "dry campus", so alcohol was banned. We worked around this by sneaking off on road trips and finding small liquor shops in places like Vermont which only sold an eclectic selection of vermouths and whiskies, which we stashed under our beds. We shuddered while we sipped, and the bottles lasted for months rather than days. Another thing: the house was never cold, which is nothing short of revolutionary for someone coming from uni life in England, where coats were worn more indoors than en route to lectures.
I learned more about literature in a year at URI than I did in two years back at home, distracted by landlord disputes, freshers flu from a cold damp house, pound-a-pint nights and a poor diet. Contact hours in Rhode Island were six per day rather than eight hours a week. It was remarkable how much work I could get done when I wasn't nursing my blistered hands after traipsing back from Tesco in the rain with several bags to an ice cold kitchen where someone would probably eat my purchases the minute I was absent.
Of course there were disadvantages. I barely did anything for myself, which is not good prep for the real world. I had to share a dorm room, which infuriated me, not least because my roomie woke up early to follow YouTube workout videos in our small room with a devotion equal to an athlete training for the Olympics; her furious panting became my morning alarm.
The tribe culture was a strange school flashback. Sorority girls were a mass of identical pink hoodies, basketball players moved in packs, fraternity guys loitered on benches in the quad. Nobody seemed to walk to lessons alone. If you didn’t find your tribe, you were on the peripherals.
I missed some things about home too: the eclectic mix of British street fashion; BBC TV;pubs; making sarcastic quips and not being met with blank faces.
I missed wearing tights without being asked in a baffled tone why "I was dressed so smart" for classes (Abercrombie and Fitch joggers only please). My "buddy" David, who the university paired me up with to help with adjusting to URI life, was appalled to hear that men wear skinny jeans in Europe. In turn, I laughed as he donned baggy jeans and a backward cap for a date, as if we’d stepped back into the Nineties.
When we did get invited to house parties where older students bought booze, it was a sobering experience watching how fast and hard people got drunk. We British exchange students wistfully recalled campus bars where people wouldn’t gyrate behind you without any warning, a seemingly normal predicament upon entering a frat house.
But overall, life at URI was more comfortable. And I quickly got used to how driven American students are. They seem to want good grades and are unabashed about admitting this.
When I first applied to write for the student newspaper, they asked me where I aspired to work eventually and why. While I was too shy to admit that I really wanted to be a journalist, my American peers happily advertised their ambition — and the titles they wished to work for one day.
And yet, there was also something childlike about URI, amidst all the giddy excitement. I sometimes felt like the wiser big sister compared to my peers, with wisdom gleaned from a harsher reality back home.
Do I wish I hadn’t experienced the URI bubble? No. I loved every moment. Did I come back to Britain feeling begrudged? No again — especially as I watched the wine glass fill up after a deadline day in our student bar and sat down next to my friends, a far cry from that strange, strange vermouth from Vermont.
