Alien Mail­box

At uni­ver­sity, I feel like an alien among students.

I have always had this idea that North Amer­i­can stu­dents were more inde­pen­dent than Euro­pean stu­dents, and that they had already one foot in the real world because a lot of them were already work­ing to pay school’s tuition. Appar­ently, this is just a stereotype.

It seems to me that stu­dents are a lit­tle bit older than French stu­dents when they start uni­ver­sity. I’d say around 20 years old rather than straight-out-of-high-school 18 years old. Yet, at 26 years old, I feel old. Like another stu­dent told me last week: “you look, like, mature”. I’m still not sure how I am sup­pose to take it.

I’m only tak­ing two classes because I’m work­ing full-time. Since I already have a uni­ver­sity degree and sev­eral years of work expe­ri­ence behind me, I don’t feel pres­sure in com­plet­ing any­thing fast. I attend uni­ver­sity because I want to. I made a choice, basically.

The sen­tence I must say the most often these days is “I can’t, I’m work­ing”. Want to come work on the research pro­posal this after­noon? “I can’t, I’m work­ing. After 5:00 pm if you want, I’m free”. “There is no class next week, all stu­dents must deliver their research paper at the sec­re­tariat which close at 4:00 pm”: “I can’t get there before 5:30-ish, I’m work­ing”. “Why don’t you come around 11:00 am to solve the admin­is­tra­tive prob­lem with a coun­selor?” “I can’t, I’m working”.

And each time I say that, peo­ple look at me, thrown into con­fu­sion. They hes­i­tate between “then what the hell are you doing at uni­ver­sity” and “how do you do it?”.

I know there must be some other stu­dents work­ing. I can’t pos­si­bly be the only one. When I took my first class this sum­mer, there were more peo­ple my age who were work­ing full-time. It is true that dur­ing the two reg­u­lar semes­ters, Fall and Win­ter, it is almost impos­si­ble to work and take sev­eral classes. The sched­ule is the main prob­lem: it is obvi­ously made for peo­ple liv­ing on cam­pus and attend­ing classes full-time. I had a lot of trou­bles pick­ing my courses for two rea­sons. First, because the admis­sion process was hell for me. Then, because by the time I was accepted, I was left with very few choices. There is no way I can attend a class which has manda­tory dis­cus­sion groups between 9:00 and 10:00 pm: how am I going to go home that late, espe­cially dur­ing win­ter? It is not prac­ti­cal either to attend lec­tures that are divided into three of four very short ses­sions each week. I’d rather attend a 3 hours long class than to come three times dur­ing the day for an hour each — I don’t think my employer would let me do that.

But above all the prac­ti­cal con­sid­er­a­tions, I feel like I’m liv­ing in another world.

I come to class after work, which means I’m usu­ally wear­ing “work clothes”. Noth­ing fancy or extremely strict: just pants, a sweater and dark shoes. But when the class started in Sep­tem­ber, and when it was still hot, I felt like a nerd in the mid­dle of a bunch of wanna-be strip­pers. Since when did mini-shorts and back­less shirts become the stu­dents’ uni­form? Gosh, I was once kicked out of class — admit­tedly in high school — because I wore jeans with holes in the knees! And can can some­one tell the guys to take off their caps when they are in class? I can’t see the board when I’m sit­ting behind them!

There is a cer­tain narrow-mindedness that dri­ves me nuts. What most stu­dents seem to care about is how many pages term papers must be, how late you can deliver them and why it is not fine to base a bib­li­og­ra­phy on Google searches. Stu­dents also have an amaz­ing sense of self-confidence that I cer­tainly didn’t have. Dur­ing the first class of a lec­ture this year, the prof explained that she requires all stu­dents to write a term paper on a sub­ject of their choice, related to the lec­ture. She added that she wanted to read some­thing per­sonal. Sud­denly, in front of the packed amphithe­ater, a stu­dent stood up and inter­rupted her: “can I write a paper on some­thing that nobody has ever writ­ten about?”. I couldn’t help think­ing: “good luck, buddy. You are a first year stu­dent of a sub­ject you don’t even know about yet, an you already claim to do bet­ter than academics!”.

All stu­dents are cer­tainly not like that. Most are quite nice, although I still can’t help think­ing I live in a dif­fer­ent world.

Maybe it’s cul­tural too. In France, we were taught to respect the profs and that our opin­ions didn’t really mat­ter after all. Appar­ently, in Canada, stu­dents’ opin­ions do: I can’t count how many classes were spent with a stu­dent argu­ing the prof was wrong.

All in all, study­ing in Canada is a fun cul­tural expe­ri­ence, sim­i­lar to find­ing a first job abroad.It’s just… dif­fer­ent.

Related arti­cles:

1. No Dark Sar­casm In The Classroom
2. The Teacher And The Test Dilemna
3. On Cam­pus (Part III)
4. From Teacher To Student
5. On Cam­pus (Part II)