Posted by Now I actually feel myself an exchange student. I have student ID card and apartment where nothing is broken. Today we started the orientation with bagels and oranges, also called breakfast here.
After that we get IDs and some essential information about stuff like studying in States and exams. I think I’m gonna write about those in some point during spring. I just don’t want to post about them before trying them myself. After those we went to nearest bank to get banking accounts. About half of us get them today and others including me will get them in couple next days. After that we got some Subs as a lunch.
Visiting U.S Bank. They had flyers and pens in their Christmas three (that they in January). 😀 There are also photo of awesome current students that are helping us during orientation. They all are very fun and nice people. 🙂
Next thing to do was exams. The first one of them was written exam of English, it was actually nice little essay made in 25 minutes. We had two topics that we had to choose one to write about – I wrote about should people get university degree to make money and get good career. I loved that topic I just had so much to say. I could actually blog about that someday.
After the essay we had TOEFL. I wouldn’t actually had to do that but it was free and I wanted to figure out how good or bad I am and how is that exam like. For me that was actually pretty easy. Or at least the first part was easy. It was the listening one, next one was grammatic and the last one was reading. Reading have always been my weakest spot because I’m quite slow reader and sometimes I have problems to concentrate in long texts about not so interesting topics. In TOEFL topics are more or less related to studying and USA. When we were done with TOEFL we had to go to math exam right away. That didn’t go very well.
So what happens if you pass or do not pass those exams? If you do great you can just study anything you ever like and you don’t have to study extra English or math. If you pass with lower grades or fail you will have more English lesson and limited access to courses during the first couple months. With math it’s same thing. But if you don’t study any math you don’t have to do the test or studies in it (as an exchange student, I’m not sure if locals have to take some basics anyway).
All those exams took about five hours, so after them I was pretty much done with studying and exams. Luckily we didn’t have to study anymore ‘cause plans for the rest of the night were huge amount of super good Mexican food from local restaurant, little grocery shopping and finally moving into my room. I love my new apartment! It’s huge and my room bigger than I’ve ever had at home (and enough space for a pole!)
During night another exchange student knock my door because he had locked himself out of his room. We called international coordinator of our uni and get him back into his room. 🙂
PS. There is nothing in Ada (but horrible snow storm), in picture below you can see some weirds foods (Vodka Sauce that actually has vodka in it and Mac&Cheese Quinoa) and only kinda taxi in Ada. 😉
Dreamer Achiever 