The second in a series looking at U.S. life and culture through its idioms.  View previous entries.

Dodged the bullet (or dodged a bullet) – Got lucky, avoided a bad outcome

I remember being horrified by the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, empathizing with the Louisiana inhabitants in Katrina’s aftermath, and being shocked by the images out of Haiti after the devastating earthquake back in 2010. All that destruction really hit me, but it was always far away – happening to someone else.

That changed over the past few days, when Hurricane Sandy approached the very place where I live now in central Pennsylvania.

The New York City skyline in darkness as Hurricane Sandy hit Monday night

At first I just thought it would be a bad storm, but then I started to hear that the people around me were taking serious precautions: stocking up on non-perishables and water, finding the safest place of their house, preparing to stay off the streets. When I caught up with the news, it was scary to hear what was heading our way; there were road restrictions, transportation shut-downs, evacuations. Even classes were cancelled at Susquehanna.

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Editor’s note: Paula is an English as a Foreign Language teacher by training, so she’ll be sharing her experience in the U.S. through the phrases she’s learning, and the valuable words that describe her feelings and experiences.  So check back regularly for Paula’s special series, “The U.S. in Words.”  And don’t forget, if you’re looking for words about the U.S. education system, we define the terms you’ve suggested in our Glossary of Confusing Words.

In hog heaven – happy, in a perfect situation

I arrived in the U.S. two months ago as a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) through a Fulbright Program. I had to literally pinch my arm to prove it wasn’t a dream. I started studying English when I was 7 and have loved the language since then. That love for English became love for the United States, and I have daydreamed about coming here ever since I was a child.

With the FLTAs at Stanford

My first week was spent at Stanford University in California, together with 56 other FLTAs from around the globe. We were spoiled like little children with delicious food, parties and all kinds of activities to start off our year before we split up to go to the universities where we would ultimately be working and studying.

Towards the end of that week, as I prepared to travel to Susquehanna University, I started thinking, “Okay, that was too good to last for long.” I was preparing myself to start feeling homesick, or even to miss my new FLTA friends. But, guess what? That never happened.

When I met my advisor, she told me that it seemed I was in hog heaven.

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A slightly lighter week this week, but still some good events looking at business school admissions, community college options, and summer programs.

Plus, the ETS is offering free GRE prep courses.  More details here: http://www.takethegre.com/free-gre-prep-series

As always, if you attend any of these events, report back and let us know what you learned! (Use the comments, the Facebook page or just email me – jstahl@voanews.com). And please share any online events you’ve found that we haven’t.

Coming up:

October 29

MBAWatch: Live Q&A with MIT Sloan
More details: http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/events 

October 30

EducationUSA: Community College Options
10am US eastern time
More details: http://www.educationusa.info/edusa_connects/
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In response to Sunny’s observation that American professors expect you to be very explicit in your writing, and that you must fully explain all of your assumptions and arguments (she says her TA advised her to “treat the professors like idiots” in her essays), commenter Dana suggests:

It is precisely because they *do* apply critical thinking skills to what they read that most Americans tend to prefer that writing be more direct and thoroughly expository, and not dependent on the reader bringing anything to it but an open mind.

Americans are culturally predisposed to be skeptical of non-fiction writing- especially journalism- that takes anything but a very straightforward and objective approach, and many of America’s best loved and most representative fiction writers like Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck are known for their masterful ability to use very simple and honest prose to present very complex ideas .

To use a common American phrase, they “tell it like it is” and in the end still require the reader to interpret what the intended message is…but Americans want to do that after getting all the facts in as plain and unvarnished a manner as they can, and tend to see any room left for interpretation in the original presentation as something to be concerned about, since that kind of vagueness is often used to justify all manner of tricks and scams.

We are at out core a nation of frontier dwelling pioneers, and people like that are generally not impressed by anything but straight talk and direct action and as a practical matter cannot afford to be hornswoggled or bamboozled by fancy talk.

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When I received my admission letter to Mount Holyoke College, I also received a set of documents outlining my financial aid package: a big grant, a much smaller loan, and earnings from my future work on campus.

I had expected loans and grants, but didn’t know much about how on-campus work would help fund my tuition.

It turns out that receiving campus earnings in your financial aid package doesn’t actually oblige you to work, but if you take advantage of the offer, students at Mount Holyoke can earn up to $2,100 per year by working at campus jobs.  If you choose to take a campus job, you get a paycheck every two weeks and are expected to use it to purchase books and other necessities. Campus jobs are actually open to any student, but students with work-study in their financial aid package are given priority in being selected for many positions.

I chose to take advantage of the work-study piece of my financial aid package, and have worked at a variety of different jobs to earn my money.

Interesting jobs

Working as a research assistant isn’t easy, but it’s rewarding (Creative Commons Photo: Stephanie Graves)

The most savvy students can get a job that not only earns them money but also gives them good experience. In my first year at Mount Holyoke, I got a position working as a research assistant for a professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian Studies. In that job I was able to apply my knowledge of econometrics.  This was a nice first job to have, as I could apply my academic knowledge and skills.

This semester I’ll be working as a research assistant for a professor in the Economics Department. This job is also related to econometrics analysis, so I am really looking forward to it.

To get one of these research jobs, you usually have to make a good impression on a professor or department.  I didn’t have to ask either of the two professors for a job – they asked me after I took their class or did other work for them.

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Before coming to the U.S., I went to college in Iraq. For four years, I was in classes five days a week from 8 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. I have no clue how my brain is still intact and functioning after that.

I’m not going to attack that style of education, but I will say that I didn’t like it.  That’s why I decided to get a fresh start here, where education has a totally different meaning.

In particular, one thing that makes learning in the U.S. unique is that you don’t only learn from books – you learn from the stories of people you meet.

In the U.S., significant efforts are made to bring students from all over the world to study here. It’s almost a guarantee that you are going to meet people who are totally different from you.

I go to school in Duluth. Where is that? I know, right! It’s a small town in Minnesota. However, I have met people there from all around the globe. During my four years at college in Iraq, can you guess how many international students I met? I met none, my dear friends.

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I will never forget my very first conversation with an American. He was an employee at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. I was a new arrival, highly exhausted after almost 20 hours of flight.

When this is all you want, and you can’t remember the word for it

Upon landing I found myself overwhelmed by homesickness, and very badly wanted to find a telephone to call my parents. I went up to this man to ask for help, but blanked immediately after opening my mouth.

I did eventually ask for the phone and call my parents, but I was so frustrated by that experience. It was as if I had never learned English before! I was considered to be good at English in China, yet I almost felt the worker at the airport was talking to me in another language.

My mind was blown again when I ate at an American restaurant for the first time. I had no idea that most of the words I had learned for food were about fast food.

It is true that we international students take the TOEFL exam before coming to the U.S., and this exam seems well-balanced in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. But it still doesn’t fully prepare you for what it’s like to be immersed in a language.

Why academics turned out to be the biggest struggle

It was inside the classroom where I really had trouble at first. I could understand lectures for the most part, except for certain accents that I had not been exposed to before. However, participating in classroom discussion was very hard.

What a small, discussion-based class might look like (Creative Commons Photo: Marcos Ojeda)

I was so shocked by my American classmates’ thought-provoking and nicely-phrased comments that I did not even try to speak out – not because of a lack of ideas, but because of a lack of confidence in my English. Since we have many interactive, small-sized classes at my school, not being able to participate in classroom discussions disappointed me very much.

[More about surviving academics in English]

Writing papers was also difficult, which was a problem because as a liberal arts major my life is always occupied with writing—lots and lots of writing. In my first semester, I would always receive comments on my papers like, “Try to be more clear (explicit),” no matter how clear and explicit I thought my papers were.

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“I realized that whatever I said and whatever I did, I was helping create my classmates’ perception of what an Afghan person is,” wrote Abuzar last week of his experience studying at a U.S. high school.  He worked hard every second to “introduce Afghanistan through the eyes of my generation, a generation tired of the animosity and ignorance that had ruled Afghanistan, endeavoring to make the country a better place.”

He’s not the only one. Muhammad wrote in to say he had a similar experience when he went abroad for the first time, thanks to a scholarship to complete his high school education at the United World College in Costa Rica.

Muhammad Jaweed Ahmadi

I was expecting to face many challenges and new life experiences, but I had no idea how to prepare myself. All I knew was that I needed to attend the college if I wanted to achieve the ideal future life that I have always worked for. I did not want to think about whether or not I was going to be welcomed by the community.

Although the prejudice of the West towards Muslims and my country is not something new, the unexpected discrimination was much worse that I imagined. I found myself shocked when I heard a classmate saying, “When I hear the name Islam, terror, killings, aggressiveness, violence, and unequal rights, come to my mind.”
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This coming week is packed with events for anyone who wants to study in the U.S., including a virtual college fair and a fair for biomedical programs, plus information on English programs, engineering and architecture programs, and business programs.

As always, if you attend any of these events, report back and let us know what you learned! (Use the comments, the Facebook page or just email me – jstahl@voanews.com). And please share any online events you’ve found that we haven’t.

Coming up:

October 22

EducationUSA: Public v. Private Universities
12pm US eastern time
More details: http://www.educationusa.info/edusa_connects/

October 23

EducationUSA: PTE English Language Test
10am US eastern time
More details: http://www.educationusa.info/edusa_connects/ 

Expartus: MBA Admissions Tips
8pm US eastern time
More details: http://poetsandquants.com/2012/09/24/webinar-offers-interview-prep-for-hbs-wharton/ 
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“Hey, who are you?” The straightforward question came to me in my first day as a high school student in America.

I was about to begin the biography-like chronicle of my life, as I would when I was back in Afghanistan, when it hit me. Who was I, indeed?

What do Americans think of when they see this? Probably not me.

It was then that I truly realized I no longer lived in Afghanistan, where I was Abuzar Royesh, a moderately well-known student in one of the best high schools in Kabul. At that moment all the adjectives I would normally use to describe myself felt hollow and empty. Who cared what my name was or how popular I was back in Afghanistan?

I realized that the farther I got from Afghanistan, the more pieces of my identity fell away. Here in the U.S. I no longer was a Hazara, a tag that distinguished me from the people of other ethnicities, a Ghaznichi (from Ghazni Province), as the inhabitants of other provinces would identify me. My most important piece of identity was not even “Abuzar Royesh,” the birth name my parents chose to for me.

Here in the U.S. I was first and foremost an Afghan: a title that conjured up Taliban and al Qaeda, war, killings, and explosions.

Cough. I cleared my throat, “I am Abuzar. I am an exchange student from Afghanistan…” Before I finished my sentence I could already see the astonishment in his eyes.

“Wow! So cool. How did you make it here?”

I started to explain my story. But just as I began the entire monologue I had memorized in response to this question, he spurted out the next one.

“What is life like in Afghanistan?”

I now attempted to answer this question. Again, before I could get my words out, further questions started showering me incessantly. I couldn’t understand his thirst for interrogating me about Afghanistan. Having lived all of my life in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to me Afghanistan was merely a country; a homeland, just like all others. I felt as ordinary in my country as any kid from the U.S. or France would feel in theirs.

Would you imagine that this is Afghanistan? It is. (Photo: Reuters)

But seemingly this wasn’t what he thought of my country. As I would learn later on, to him and many other Americans, Afghanistan was just a remote land where thousands of American soldiers sacrificed their lives in a doomed attempt to bring democracy and stability, and where billions of American dollars had vanished. They were apparently startled to meet someone actually from there; someone who had a different story from what they knew.
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Someday this would all be mine

I remember the very day I received the letter that I had been accepted as an undergraduate student at Johnson & Wales University. I had big dreams and aspirations about what I was going to become upon graduation from one of the best hospitality schools in the United States. I envisioned myself becoming a successful hotelier; the next big thing in Burma.

I remember when I was granted my student visa after hearing that many other Burmese students had been rejected, I just could not have been happier. The following night I had a fiesta with my family and friends to bid them all farewell, and I had a flashback of all the great times I would be leaving behind in Burma.

When I look back at those moments, now that I am a graduate student at Georgetown University working on my degree in public relations and corporate communications, all I can think about is what I should have done differently.

What I did while trying to land a sponsored job

I thought graduating from an American college would set me up for a career in the United States in my chosen field.  In Asia a bachelor’s degree from an American college would have helped me attain a job without much effort.  But that was not how it worked when I tried to find a job in the U.S.

After graduation I started my OPT (Optional Practical Training) with hopes of pursuing a career in the hospitality industry and gaining several years of work experience in America.  I interned at a New York City hotel for a year, hoping it would later turn into a full-time job. But it didn’t, and it ended up being difficult to find an employer who would sponsor me for a work visa.  I interviewed with several hotels who said they couldn’t consider me if I needed sponsorship.

[What one student learned about finding work experience in the U.S.]

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Over on the University of Virginia’s admissions blog, Senior Assistant Dean of Admissions Jeannine Lalonde got fed up with the misinformation she was seeing on forums and message boards about how many recommendation letters to submit to a college.  She struck back with this bit of valuable information about how the admissions office uses recommendations:

Your counselor’s recommendation will be the one that sets the stage. They usually talk about the “big picture.”  The go beyond the information in the school profile to tell us about your class and what big choices you may have made about your academics.  Your teacher’s recommendation will be about the day-to-day.  They are often more personal and more anecdotal.  They tell us about those great contributions you’ve made in class or the projects you’ve done that have gone beyond their expectations.

And as for whether you should submit more than the requested number of recommendation letters?

No one at UVa wants this.  No one.  Colleges ask for the items they would like to receive. 

Read her full comments on the Notes from Peabody blog.

After worrying about leaving home and my friends/family, here are some of my new friends in the US

Being raised with Eastern roots, I have gotten used to a lot of things growing up. I can’t eat a full meal without rice, I can’t sleep without a bolster pillow, and I can’t imagine living without my parents. Even at the age of 21, when “leaving the nest” is normal in some cultures, in the East we still live with our families. Living under one roof is practically mandatory, even after you’ve become legal or started your career, that is until you get married.

I first came to the U.S. at the age of 5 with my mother, who was pursuing a graduate degree, and then moved back to Indonesia after she graduated. Though we lived in Indonesia for about 10 years, I experienced culture shock in my own country and longed to come back to the U.S. to pursue my education. Don’t get me wrong, I love Indonesia, but I sometimes felt out of place in my native land. I started composing a plan to move back to the U.S., beginning with majoring in English literature at the University of Indonesia. Out of the blue, my mother got a job posting in Washington, D.C. and I happily moved with my whole family to start my college education from scratch in the U.S.

But there was a catch. My mother’s work post was only for 2 years and that meant I had to stay behind to finish my Bachelor’s degree … without my family. I had never lived alone!

But in my two years living in D.C., I have learned that there are ways to survive living out of your comfort zone, and have become prepared to cope with the reality of living away from my family. I have found that being away from my home doesn’t have to mean being alone.

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When I first joined the Student Union, I quickly discovered that most of my fellow bloggers, and indeed most of our readers, were students from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, not from Western Europe like me, and certainly not from England. At first I thought this might be a problem.

Do I really deserve my place here, being from a relatively comfortable background and part of a culture that many think closely resembles America? Will my experiences and anecdotes, troubles and triumphs, be as valuable or even as interesting as those of somebody who is coming to America from a place where everything from the language to the food is unfamiliar? How can I relate to people from all over the world, having only really experienced the European way of life?

And as I considered that last question, I began to think that actually maybe I’m not the only one who is nervous about, essentially, making friends in America.

Making friends was my biggest worry when I started university in England, and it was my biggest worry again when I came to America. Except this time, I wouldn’t be one among many students starting school for the first time. I would be the outsider; the new kid starting two years after everyone else had already settled in, the English boy who dresses a bit differently and has a funny accent. But worst of all, I would be alone, without any friends or family nearby to go and talk to or just to relax with – no way to escape from the pressure of trying to assimilate and make friends.

So you can begin to understand the mental state I had somehow put myself in by the time I arrived here at the University of Maryland.

You might be thinking that I don’t know the meaning of the word ‘daunting,’ being a Brit and sharing some familiar cultural customs with America as we do.  I know that in many ways I have it easier than other international students.  After all, I didn’t have to worry about my language skills, and many people in England even complain about how much our culture has been Americanized -  we have brands like Hollister, we have snapback baseball caps, and we have a desire to be constantly entertained.

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