It’s the start of the Spring Semester, which means that all of the fall expats are back in the States on our beloved Canton campus! Although us domestic students are surely excited to see our previously-foreign friends, the question of whether they themselves are excited to be at SLU remains. After conversing with Max Lang ’27 about his experience integrating into campus culture after travelling to the U.K. with last year’s London FYP cohort, it seems common for individuals to struggle with the adjustment.
Lang explained that coming to campus for the first time last spring as a first year was a major learning curve. “Especially when we got back a day or two before classes, you have to learn the environment so fast. Get into a routine, get into habits, and be forced to be a student on top of a social human being. It was difficult to juggle.”
This also held true for many of Lang’s peers, who anticipated an easier introduction to such a small, remote campus setting after having taken on the third-largest city in the world. In reality, the majority of them found it difficult to be in a place with so much less independence and “‘fit in’ to find our own groups and our individual college experiences… when we feel like we didn’t have a lot of options socially,” stated Lang.
Lang recognized that the University did as much as it could to ease the transition, and that change is always difficult. “It’s sort of up to you,” he concluded. “You could sit and wallow and let it be hard, or you could take control and be social by putting yourself in uncomfortable positions. A lot of people who spent their first semester abroad have definitely done that and are enjoying themselves a lot more now than originally.”
Each traveler is different, but at least in Lang’s experience coming back truly was the hardest part. “My time in London was truly the best four months of my life,” he said. Regardless of the hardship, he said he would still “do it again in a heartbeat” as it pushed the group to look inside themselves and grow to a higher degree.