Posted in October 2015

Hi everyone,

My name is Anouk and I was given the opportunity to go abroad to the U.S. with the Global E3 program. After all the paperwork and arranging, which is a lot of work but definitely worth it, I got excepted to the University of Florida located in Gainesville. Now it’s the end of september and I have been here for around 6 weeks already, I’ll share my experiences so far with you in this post!

First of all being a student at UF (university of florida) is a really special thing, over here the school spirit is one of the most important things. Every students is a gator, gators referring to alligators which is also the school mascots. It’s not unusual to see people walking around totally dressed in orange and blue which are the school colors. All of this is definitely combined during football games in the swamp, a stadium which can hold over 90 000 people! To experience everything, me and some other exchange students bought season tickets, which means we will go to all 7 home games this fall. The Gators (football players) have been doing great so far with 4 wins out of 4 games, I can’t wait to see what happens this Saturday!

Next to this amazing experience a lot of stuff has happened in the past few weeks! I had been to the United States before so I knew something about some crazy habits most Americans have such as: taking the car everywhere (even from 1 part of the parking lot to the other part), setting the air conditioning to freezing mode while the weather is so nice outside and almost never cooking a home cooked meal.

One of the most amazing things is the amount of new people I have met from all over the world. Also all American students are really interested when you tell that you are from The Netherlands, even tough some of them don’t even know where that is exactly…

I would love to tell more but I have 2 exams this Thursday so I should continue studying now… (big difference with Delft: not only final exams but lots of homework and test during the semester) I will try to post a new post in about 2 weeks to tell you more about all my experiences, go Gators!

Anouk