FIGHT ON!!

Now that my semester is officially over, let me reflect on the things that I have learned since I studied here in America.

1. The pencil is mightier that the pen.
- All the students here use pencil!! Just like grade school!! See previous post on October 18.

2. Birds of the same feather flock together.
- Students of the same race and color flock together. It is very rare that you see a white student and an Asian student together outside the classroom. There is the white chicks group (the sorority type), white guys groups, African-American group, Asian group which is sub-divided to the Chinese group, Korean group, and other Asian nation group.

3. You can wear anything to class
- I know it is also the same in UP but anything here means anything! I had a classmate in a GE class and I think she was wearing the same clothes that she went to bed in to. We had the final exam that day and it was 8:00 in the morning so she probably didn’t have time to change clothes. She was wearing pajamas and a white wifebeater (sando to those who don’t know) without a bra!! She looked like she just woke up. It would have been quite ok if she was pretty but she wasn’t. I really don’t understand those students!! People, have the decency!!! I always wake up at least 2 hours before class so I can take a shower and put on clean clothes!

4. There’s no such grade as A+.
- I thought the highest grade that you could get was A+, my bad. It only goes A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D- and F. The grading system here is quite confusing!!! They give you letter grades then they convert it to 100 scale or the other way around then to the 4.0-1.0 scale. Why do you have to get the letter grade?! All you need is the 100 scale!!

5. Once the class is over, students use their cell phones right away to call their friends.
- They immediately call their friends to ask them where they are or what they are doing or if they want to meet up or other shit. I just don’t get it. They use their cell phone even when they are riding their bikes or skateboarding! No wonder there are accidents inside the campus involving these kinds of students.

6. They also use bluebook.
- I was surprised to know that they also use a bluebook here. It is the same in UP, it is color blue and has the school seal in front. The only difference is that it comes in large and small sizes. But we don’t really use it that often since it just depends on the professor. Mostly professors provide the test papers. We just used it for the essay type exam.

7. The calculators that they use are the graphical ones.
- Everytime a calculator is needed in an exam, students take out their huge graphical calculators while I just use my ordinary scientific calculator. It is kind of unfair because sometimes in the exam, there are a few questions about linear programming and it takes me longer to figure out the graph and the value of the x and y. For them, they just put in the given then tada.... you have your graph and the x and y values. Now, I'm really thinking about buying a graphing calculator.


These are all that I can think right now. I’m already in vacation mode so my mind is quite blank. I’ll just add some stuff later if I remember some more.