University Life

Hello Everyone!! I hope life is treating you all well. 🙂

As my title indicated, I want to take a moment and talk about how completely different university life here in the UK is. Coming from Luther College in small town Decorah, Iowa, I am certain University of Nottingham’s campus is larger than the downtown area and Luther’s campus combined. So in other words, the school is enormous!! Not lying…Apple Maps was my guide to classes during the first week In addition to the campus itself, the lectures are quite different. One of my lectures have close to 400 students. The professor usually stands up in front of the class and goes of off a slide show. There isn’t a lot of chances for questions or interactions with other students or the professor. A lot of the learning depends on the students reading the materials and doing research on their own to understand and/or further their knowledge on a topic. It is no where close to how Luther goes about teaching its courses. After getting a taste of both campuses, I sure miss my liberal arts college.

Tennis has been going great! I have meant some really nice people in the club. The level of talent here at Nottingham is amazing. There are six women’s competitive teams, where team 1 is filled with world rank players. That is outstanding! During developmental training, I have gotten to know some of the other female players pretty well. At first, it was kind of awkward since the attitude on the court is different. For instance, when I play, I will generally give compliments like “Nice serve” or “Great rally” or what not, but when I first said that to my opponent, they gave me a weird look. Also, when I played doubles, I put my hand up for a high five with my partner and she gave me a strange look. Some of the girls I played with caught on and would give me a high five back :). I guess, the tennis culture here does not show much emotion when player. That is a complete contrast to the environment in the US. At Luther, we would cheer our teammates on from several courts down.

One major difference in societies (university clubs) is that their events all center around drinking. For instance, my psychology club has events planned for drinking and dancing at a night club from 9PM-3AM in a Thursday! I am shocked by this!! The sporting clubs also do this. Most events will take place at a dance club or at a pub. I find that so interesting. There is definitely a culture here surrounded by drinking. Some of the girls and guys at practice have asked “Are you going out tonight?” on a Tuesday morning. I was like “um… it Tuesday” and their response to that was “Ya so what. We have been out every night this week”. I was too shocked to utter a response. This was also something that came up in one of my Luther courses that is taught over here. Why is there a larger drinking culture here? Is it because of the lower age restriction? Is drinking a response to a stressor? It is not just the student who drink a lot, adults will be at pubs starting at 3PM (after work) until late. I personally think there is more to the increase in alcohol consumption than what is on the surface.

That’s all for now. Check back this weekend for another post. It has been a crazy week and will catch you up on Week 2 after its done. 🙂