Tips for upcoming exchange students to Florida

Tips for incoming exchange students, , , , , ,

In case someone might search for student exchange stories about UF, and stumble upon this site, I’ll prove a list of tips to help you.

  • Always go for on-campus residence, it will be less luxurious than off-campus and you will probably share a room, meaning less privacy. But off-campus (international Weaver Hall for us, try to apply ASAP), means that you won’t be on a convenient location (having to take the bus etc.) And you won’t be with other Internationals (that generally have the same mentality of taking a less serious, and more outgoing approach for the semester.)
  • Sign up for the NAVIGATORS (the international association, not the Christian one), this will make it very easy to make a lot of American friends since you’ll be paired with an American. This is the reason you don’t need to be off-campus (where you’d meet other Americans)
  • On the first days you can get in the Weaver Hall (almost a week before the start of classes), you can find a donation center in the basement. This will have really useful kitchen utensils/clothing hangers/bedlinnen/lamps/mini-fridges(!!). The earlier you get here, the better the stuff that you can get here.
  • DONT take a meal plan. Unless you are extremely lazy at cooking and want to pay an overpriced meal plan that you’re gonna complain about after several weeks. You can still go to the dining hall and pay for your food separately if you really want to go. The options here are either fast food or extremely not appealing (so I’ve been told.)
  • Take transferwise as a debitcard, it has the same features (or even more) than most banks, and a low conversion rate. It uses Mastercard which means it’s a credit card from USA’s perspective. (The only thing you can’t pay with this is the ONE.UF bursar (for on-campus rent).
  • If you don’t need a lot of data, you can take RedPocket as a phone service plan, it has the cheapest plan with 3-4G available, you’ll have good wifi on campus and several pubs. (Having a different billing address than the shipment address is only possible if you contact them directly.)
  • Apply early for Gator Gears, it’s a bike rental service for 40 bucks a month, it’s super safe to bike on campus and if you’re careful/good biker you can take it to nearby supercenters as well.
  • Sign up for the six month Amazon Prime trial, as a student you are eligible for one.

Week 6: St. Augustine and froyo!

Weekly blogpost, , , , , ,

On Saturday, we went on a trip with the Navigators to St. Augustine, a very beautiful place as you will see in the pictures. Since it is/was a harbor, we also made use of the beach at the ocean (for me the first time since I’ve been in Florida). It was fun to meet other people from the Navigators and we visited little shops in St. Augustine.

Fun facts

  • Amount of guys I’ve seen with a tank-top: 5 per week en moyenne (I expected this to be a lot higher)
  • Amount of people that have complimented my Puma shoes: 9 so far
  • Amount of times I had to resort to Pepsi because Coca-Cola is almost never served at bars/campus 😥 : 19
  • Amount of times my semi-fake-mentor Kristen has quoted “The Office”: too many to count 😅😅

Another thing I love about UF, how lively everything is at night (since it is such a nice climate at night still). Wednesday we were asked by a tattooed guy with a hat if we wanted to do magic tricks with cards. The first trick I saw, but the rest of them really left me flabbergasted…

For Engineering Innovation, I had to come up with a need statement, for something that could be improved in society. For this I chose the fact that too many dogs are being bred instead of adopted from shelters. However, this meant that I had to put up questionnaires and interview people about this matter, I have to do something for which I hated other people in the past..

Finally, I got to try something that I really always wanted to do since I’d seen it on the amazing show: “The Good Place” (here they interpreted heaven as a place that also has a FROYO(!!) on every corner. Really, it’s amazing). For the first time in my life I tried frozen yoghurt, and it was setup in a such a way that you can choose your own flavors.

Frozen yoghurt at Menchie’s

On Friday we first went to GatorNights (if you go to almost all of them, you’ll get a prize). The highlight of this night was the Oxygen bar, something which apparently was also in the Netherlands. However, just as with froyo and goat yoga, I didn’t know we had this in my own country. The oxygen bar was a sketchy experience and a bit of a let down, but fun nonetheless. Talking about goat yoga, I might sign up for a class since they offer it at campus as well (as long as the goats decide not to shit on me, that is.)

Oxybar outside of Reitz on GatorNights

Week 5: Football game at UF

Weekly blogpost, , , , , ,

It’s Saturday, and it’s the day of the first football game at campus. It’s the Gators against UT Martin. What to do on this day? First I will need to buy an orange shirt that will combine well with the blue bandana that my mentor gave me for the game. I already have an orange shirt, with UF ’23 however, which essentially screams ‘Freshman’, so that’s not an option. So I went to the thrift shop, and bought this beautiful shirt with “I-L-L I-N-I” on it, it was either this or the blood donor shirt so the decision was easy. After thrift-shopping, I joined my friends at the tailgating of the surf club. Which was a bit too fun, because I found myself hurrying towards Weaver to meet with a friend to get to the game in time. Something which apparently was not meant to be, since I had to login, already being in the application, to get the QR code. The correct password was not in my key-library and none of my own passwords worked, so I did a hail mary with resetting the password and hoping for a quick e-mail. This resulted in us being 6 minutes late for the game, which was not a big problem at all looking back. The game was fun, even though only 1 hour of the 3.15 hours was filled with the actual game. A lot of nice chants I could sing along (although they said gator bait at some point, which I really understood as Gatorade, confusing me a bit).

If you look closely you can find me in the background

September the 8th, a special day for me, finally turning 21 in the USA. This day I had a pita gyros from the local Greek, which made me very happy. And don’t tell this to my parents, but I bought rum and vodka to celebrate with shots/mixed drinks with friends that evening. Gina gave me special color changing bike lights (for the spokes) as a present, a very cool gift!

On Wednesday, Gina decided to join Dennis, Kristen (my fake mentor) and me to the Grogs. A club that has free drinks and you only have to pay 5/3 dollars depending on you being 21+ or not. A very special night because Gina turns 20 at midnight!

A story about my fake mentor…

Before I actually was assigned to a mentor with the Navigators, it had been a couple of days since I applied and a lot of friends already were coupled with mentors. So at the Young Life BBQ event (a Christian organization that does extra non-religious activities), Dennis and I met Kristen. Kristen is a Young Life member who also really wanted to be in the Navigators, but thought she was too late to apply. Since we hadn’t heard anything from the Navigators we just created our own “fake” navigators mentor/mentees group. Later on, Dennis got paired with Sydney, and I with Gina. We asked our mentors if we could merge our two groups into one and apparently they already were best friends, what a coincidence! After this, we asked them to add Kristen as well, and with her and Gina talking in the: “The More the Merrier” group, they found out they were talking to someone they already knew, while walking out a meeting together of a club they are both in. That’s how, strangely, we all were connected somehow!