Monthly Archive for February, 2006

America is too big!

In the week to follow, I started making my top ten list of universities. Therefore I had to surf through the ISEP website. I decided to select a site by field of study. I filled in Journalism and English. That got me a list of 51 universities spreaded over 28 states. You’ll imagine that it was a heck of a job to select my favorite universities.

Because, where do you pay attention to?

1. Is it a restricted site?

That means that the university is thát popular, that you probably won’t stand a chance to be placed there. You can only put this site on top of your list, which means you can only put one restricted site to your list. I decided to not list any restricted site.

2. In which state lies the university?

I don’t want to study in the middle of nowhere, so I decided to let go of Texas, Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming and a couple more.

3. What kind of courses does the university offer?

Some have a wide range of courses, others have nothing interesting.

In the meanwhile, it became harder and harder for me. It had already cost me hours and hours.

4. How is the university graded, what’s the reputation of this school and how is the level of teaching?

I have to say, I couldn’t care less. I don’t care if the university is highly recommended or not. My first goal isn’t to learn schoolthings, my first goal is to survive in an Englishspeaking country! I want to have fun, meet new people and just live abroad for a while, I think I will learn enough anyway!

5. What do they offer beside studythings?

Same here. It’s nice if there are free fitness facilities, weekendtrips of hightech computerfacilities, ofcourse these things are important, but how do you find out what and where is better? I have more things to do!

So, finally, I got my list of universities. It became a top eight list. I had to list at least six sites, so I thought this would be enough. I have to say, I didn’t sort everything out. At one point, I had enough of it. I concluded that it would be a total adventure anyway!

I need to do this

For several years, I knew I wanted to go abroad someday. I could have done it all these years, but I never dared. I was afraid. Where to go, what to do, how to do it… But this was the time. My relationship ended, I was still in school and ofcourse, I had enough time, before ending up in tiring fulltime jobs.

So I made an appointment at my university. These were my exact words: “I want to go abroad. To a country where the main language is English. I don’t care where exactly. I also don’t have a clue what I want to do. Studying maybe, or an internship. I want to go around february and ofcourse, it had to be affordable. Have you got a suitable program?”

The advisor immediately came up with ISEP: “You can do the study exchange with America. You can go there for a semester to do some courses which lay in the lenght of your current program. I got the information here. How does that sound?”

Ofcourse, that sounded great. I would have never come up with the US myself, but why not?! I never been outside of Europe before. If I do this, I better do it good! So I started the process of searching universities and filling in forms. USA, here I come!