Intercultural exchange

Hello!

Well, we are at the end of the course… What a pity! :(

During this semester I enjoyed very much the intercultural exchange! Unfortunately ,I was in the group which was supposed to do the exchange with Poznan but it didn’t work. So, we Skyped only three times! However, with this exchange we had the possibility to know Rocio, a Spanish girl who is in Dickinson for one year ,as a teacher assistant. I think she spoke very good English, even if her pronunciation was typically Spanish.

In our talks we spoke a lot about College life in Dickinson and University life in Padua, which was the topic of our final project. I reconsider my own culture as far as concerning university life. For example, in Padua we give a lot of importance to meet ourselves on Wednesday. It’s cool because it’s like a sort of tradition; every week we go out and we meet always the same people. While, I recognized that Americans students don’t have a typical day in which they join together during the week.
I felt comfortable when I spoke about University life in Padua. I had to say a lot of things about it! I don’t know why but I was very proud to describe our University lifestyle; especially the “spritz hour” on every Wednesday.

I learned a lot of things about life at school. Firstly, American students live in the campus and all their scholastic and extra-scholastic activities take place within the college and the campus: as a consequence, even parties will take place in the campus. Secondly, American students have fraternities and sororities. Outside the US these college organisations are quite rare.In Italy they doesn’t exist at all. Speaking with our peer, it emerged that the overall impression of Italian students on fraternities has been distorted by the great amount of movies and TV-movies which are broadcasted in Europe. These movies succeeded in conveying the idea that being part of such membership is the best way to enjoy college; moreover, it may help you gaining respect and getting privileges. Our partner pointed out that to have real fun at college, it is not necessary to join one of these fraternities and sororities, which are actually not appreciated by international students. They are perceived as “communities within a community” and students decide to join them otherwise they wouldn’t have good friends in the campus.
Moreover, I understood that The American University system is better organized than the Italian system. American students are more comfortable than Italians because they study in campus, so they don’t need to walk around the city to go to lesson.

I tried to explain to our peer the difference between the South and the North of Italy. We talked about “mafia”. I tried to explain her that this minority of people is the major cause of backwardness of the South. However, this region has to be consider for its artistic beauty and wonderful landscapes. So, I tried to convince her to see the South not just as the place of “Mafiosi”. In other words, I tried to avoid the common prejudice of “mafiosi”, which foreigners always attribute to those people who live in the South.

With this exchange I improve my pronunciation of some words such as: “scientific”; “culture”; “medieval”; “undoubtedly”. Moreover, I tried to improve my intonation of other words, such as: “secretary”; “bye”; “interests”. So, I think I became a little more quickly to understand people speaking in English and American. While with non-native speakers I spoke Italian very slowly, trying to articulate sounds and words in a very clear way.

Finally, doing the wiki project I learned new words, such as bagel ( a ring-shaped bread roll); sorority ( a society of female university or college students); beer-pong (a table of ping pong where they play different games and when somebody loses they have to drink); and so on. Moreover, I tried to improve my academic style of writing, focusing my attention on my usual mistakes, such as verb tenses and the use of preposition.

Ok, that's all folks!!