If you've talked to me in the last month, you've basically already read this blog entry. It occurred to me that a lot of the conversations I've been having are probably the type of thing that the CS Department would be interested in seeing here.
It took about a month and a half for me to stop feeling like an outsider at ACMT. I've found students there to come off as rather judgmental and unfriendly, and in retrospect, I probably gave the same impression, which is why for the first half of the quarter I felt like the new kid in middle school. Now I can expect to walk outside for a cigarette with the rest of the college and find at least one person I know to talk to.
If I could do this again, I would try to change a few things.
a.) I would study Croatian before arriving. The "American" part of ACMT doesn't extend beyond the language of instruction and general teaching style (as far as I can tell). I feel pretty alien when I can't even read the graffiti on the desks I sit at. I look like an outsider as it is - I have short hair that I rarely bother to style, I don't wear makeup unless I'm feeling particularly boring, I don't wear a skirt and sexy leather jacket to class, and *gasp* I carry a bookbag to school. Not speaking the language seems like a reason to talk about me from two feet away.
b.) I would not travel in a pack of RIT students. (This one is hard to avoid, since when we got here I didn't know anybody else, and I didn't know where I was going most of the time, so I couldn't just head off by myself. On top of that, I was feeling like the new kid! I didn't want to abandon the comfort of my circle of nerds carrying laptops!) I imagine we were very difficult to approach as a group, because only a few of the more adventurous ACMT students made friends with us before we started to break down into subgroups.
c.) Be very prepared to not fit in. Going from somewhere where I feel extremely comfortable to somewhere where I don't know anyone, don't speak the language and look different was a shock. It's not that I was expecting everything to go smoothly - I wasn't really expecting anything in particular.
Outside of the RIT students I'm traveling with, I have met possibly one or two people that I will stay in contact with. Plenty that I can run into and talk with or meet for coffee, and one in particular that I see every day, but no really close friends. For a while I felt kind of disappointed by this lack of new connections, but after considering that all the people I consider really close friends took many months to years to get to that point, it doesn't seem as disappointing as at first thought. Additionally, part of me is emotionally preparing to leave, and not allowing some friendships to deepen.
I've heard it said that people who are bilingual end up being not especially proficient in either language, while people who are monolingual speak their one language better than bilingual people speak either language. I'm finding this to be true. This is going to sound really pretentious, but, when I'm with my Croatian friends who speak English as a second language, I filter my vocabulary slightly, because a couple of times I've used a word or two that my ESL friends don't know, which makes me look, well, pretentious. I've always had a general feeling of inadequacy for not speaking more than one language fluently, but now I'm starting to appreciate being monolingual. I still should have studied Croatian.
I looked in the RIT course catalog for a course in Croatian...and it doesn't exist. As languages go, it isn't as practical as Spanish or Chinese, but RIT has had a secret college in Croatia for over 10 years, and they don't offer the language?! Perhaps I'll raise the issue when I get back. Or next time I need to procrastinate.
Which I'm doing now. Back to work, or possibly bed.
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