Abstract
But when I look back now that summer seemed to last forever and if I had the choice yes, I'd always want to be there. Those were the best days of my life'. This quotation of Canadian singer Bryan Adams sums up pretty well what I think about my exchange program in the United States, with only one exception, it wasn't summer of 1969 but the fall of 2009. Otherwise I completely agree with the above statement, which shows pretty well how much I appreciated my overseas experience! I'll give as much information as possible concerning my stay in Tampa, Florida, studying at the University of South Florida for one semester. I'll begin with a few general facts about the area, the city of Tampa itself and the classes I took during my stay. I'll then present my weekly journal summing up the feelings and impressions I had during my immersion in this new culture and highlight some of the common points and differences between my home country and the one I was staying in for a few months. I'll describe as precisely as possible what this wonderful experience means to me and how much I think it has changed my point of view about the United States of America, about living abroad, about being different and even about myself.
Extract
[...] And within two weeks of trip, I really made a lot of progress in English. It made me realize that it was such a shame to be with other French people in Tampa since it prevented me to be in a real cultural and language immersion. When studying in Tampa, I was living in the same hall than the three other students also coming from the Magistere de Gestion and we also met a few other French students. So, even if I really made a lot of efforts to speak English as often as possible even when we were between French people, I often met one of my French friends in a hallway and we often spoke French a few minutes when anybody from any other culture were there. [...]
[...] The goal was to form groups depending on your belonging to different categories. We for example divided first between women and men, then between people under 25 years old and people over, and so on. At the end of the class, the teacher proposed us to divide ourselves depending on our religious views. In France, such a proposition would not have been followed by excitement from the class, for sure There, everybody was excited to discover about the other's religious views. [...]
[...] It was probably a 20-minute walk from where we used to live. All our fellow classmates took their cars to go to class even if the sun was shinning and if they were absolutely not in a hurry. And at the beginning of the semester they were completely amazed that we came walking and refused their rides to go to school So walking in the States is much scarcer than in France and most of the roads even don't have any sidewalk which makes walking often really dangerous and scary. [...]
[...] I was astonished to see so many highways and interstates intersecting, especially when you come from the international airport of Tampa (TPA). The city centre is called Tampa Downtown and located on the Southern part of the agglomeration, bounding the Hillsborough River. The landscape of Downtown matches exactly the prejudice I had about American cities before coming: high amazing buildings and skyscrapers gathering banks and financial organizations. But this district is far from being the only part of the city. [...]
[...] The courses I took were most of the time very interesting. We had to pick courses from the College of Business (as it was the closest to our studies at the University of Dauphine) and to have at least 9 credits. I took 3 different classes and tried to cover different fields in order to discover different things and to make the most of my stay at the USF from an academic point of view. I thus chose classes called Managing diversity, Negotiating Agreement & Resolving Conflict, and Consumer Behaviour Theory. [...]
