Edinburgh Exchanges

Life is so busy here! Just when I think being away from my crazy life at Edinburgh will give me a relaxing university life here at Miami, freshers week ended and my week of auditions began. Those of you who know me well will understand that I am what I like to call a ‘compulsive applier’, meaning something like the freshers fair is a complete nightmare for me. I find it very hard to say no to people, and so when I’m surrounded by societies all dying for my contact details and offering freebies in return, I completely cave under the pressure.

Last year in Edinburgh I spent almost an hour signing up to societies and ended up being involved in several sports teams and 3 drama productions in my first term – a total of almost 27 hours rehearsing in my spare time outside of my academic life! Therefore, as I headed over to the Miami freshers fair, I had a steely resolve that I would be picky this year. Holding on firmly to my roommates, I pushed through the thousands of freshman to find that not only were there more societies than Edinburgh, the fair was more than triple the size and freebies extended to personal electronic equipment rather than the odd pen or notebook that Scotland offered me. Needless to say, I lost my roommates almost immediately and only emerged, slightly dazed, after 3 hours (!) of saying yes to everyone I met. I’m ashamed to say I have a slight memory block at this point (my mind sometimes forgets traumatic experiences) as to which societies exactly I signed up for, but as I searched through my 3 huge bags of free food and stationary later that evening I was somewhat surprised to find a Miami GAY AND PROUD mug that had obviously been thrust into my trembling hands. I sheepishly blocked their incessant messaging from my already overflowing email inbox, although I do admit that I love the mug!

However, I digress from the point at hand. People were always telling me before I came here that things in the USA would be BIG – but I never really thought about it until I emerged from that traumatic freshers fair. The cars are huge, the buildings are massive, the highways are ridiculously wide and the people – well, I’ll save that for my next blog; keep tuning in!

As I mentioned in my introduction, I love to dance – any form, but especially ballet, jazz and gymnastic dance – and so I was especially excited to sign up for the cheerleading and dance teams. Although I like to pretend that I’m British and proud of it, I’m ashamed to say that there has always been a small screaming scantily clad girl with pom poms lurking inside me, and that girl was pushing to get out. Miami has several dance teams, including the cheerleaders that perform at football games; dance competition teams that travel to external championships and hip hop dance teams that perform around campus. All these societies raped me of my contact details at the freshers fair, and so it was with great excitement that I signed up for audition times…

…Great excitement which faded rapidly as I arrived at the gym and was immediately surrounded by tanned, flexible, petite dancers. I don’t know if dancing is compulsory for USA high schools, but it really seemed as if every girl I had met danced to the same, and mostly better, standard than me – who has been lucky enough to have extra curricular dance lessons for 17 years (Thank you parents!) Unlike the UK based dance teams I’ve been part of, showing your midriff during tryouts were compulsory for all wannabe cheerleaders, as was an advanced technique in gymnastic tumbling. All romantic notions stemmed from the film ‘Bring It On’ went down the drain pretty suddenly and my week of auditions gave my self-esteem quite a knock! However, I was delighted to be chosen for the Miami cheer dance competition team – ‘Miami Motion’, whose outfit was by far the cutest and whose dances seemed slightly less provocative, thank heavens. I’ll tell you more about how the team goes as we begin practising!

I have too much more to say, but I’ll save it for now. Do keep in touch and keep commenting!

A rather tired (but thinner and fitter) Kate x

Byron Bay is Wicked and Finding Nemo

Being a science student at Edinburgh has meant I’ve never had reading week off so ‘mid-semester’, or ‘spring-break’ as all the American’s call it has been an amazing novelty to me! I did two trips; Firstly a road-trip to Byron Bay in ‘Wicked Campers’ and then a marine biology field trip to Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

Six of us hired two ‘Wicked Campers’ www.wickedcampers.com.au for five days and drove down to Byron Bay, a cool hippy town on the coast a few hours south of Brisbane. It really was everything we expected; a totally chilled out town with beautiful beaches and national parks. It was my friends 21st birthday which was the main reason behind hiring the vans and everything about it was epic!

The Wicked Vans fit three people in the front when you’re driving and the back has a table and seating during the day and turns into a massive bed at night. They’re pimped out, covered in graffiti and each one has a totally different design; we had ‘BB King’ :

which was sooooo random but the design was really cool haha! We bought Walkie Talkies to communicate between vans which came in really useful when we were navigating our way around and to play games between vans on the freeway.

The road trip itself was so much fun and we arrived at night and ended up camping on a cliff-face looking out onto the bay on the first night. We pretty much chilled out on the amazing beaches all day, went surfing, cooked on the beachside BBQs (a brilliant feature of Aussie beaches), and then drank and socialised round our cooking-stove-fire at night. We stayed in a campsite for two nights so we could get hot water and other than that parked on the cliff-face under the stars. The whole trip was amazing … it was really cool to cook for ourselves and have the freedom of having a car. The novelty provided endless amusement and luckily they were really easy to drive. There was a surprising amount of space in the back but it got so incredibly hot in the mornings and forced us to wake up at 8am everyday due to the immense heat inside the vans!

I can’t really get over how much fun we had … it was really cheap too. It cost about £70 per person for 5 days in the vans and then about another £40 for petrol, food and campsites. Staying in hostels would have been at least £10-£15 a night and then we would have had to pay quite a bit to get there and wouldn’t have been able to get to the good beaches without a car. Here's a picture of our favourite beach where we spent most of our time:

The comedy the vans provided made it money well spent without a doubt- I can’t wait for the next roadtrip!

The second part of my mid-semester was a 5 day field-trip to ‘Heron Island’, a tiny island on the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. The island is soooo small, you can walk round the circumference in 20 minutes! It was really stunning – the water was crystal clear, a hundred shades of blue with white sands. There’s only a research centre and a 5-star resort on the island so it’s really empty and it really felt like we were on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, especially because there was no mobile phone reception! This is me jumping about:

Luckily we didn’t have to do that much research, the course is a bit of a joke to be honest – it’s full of International Students who want to do this field trip. There’s not even one Australian in the class. We did a project on damsel fish and their behavioural responses when we placed a mirror in front of their coral home. We were trying to see if they attacked their reflection in the mirror (indicating strong territorial behaviour) or whether they didn’t care at all. It was pretty fun snorkelling around and duck diving to record data, especially since some of the fish went mental and repeatedly attacked the mirror.

Apart from that, we had a lot of free time to chill out on our deserted island and snorkel. The research station organised boats to take us out to some great reef areas and we snorkelled with sharks, stingrays, masssssssive turtles and thousands of fish. I was pretty happy because I found Nemo living in his anemone with his dad. There were some really impressive coral formations and really beautiful fish. We saw lots of sharks – white tips, black tips, reef sharks, carpet sharks and one of the groups snorkelled above a tiger shark, the most aggressive shark predator! Our tutors said they’d never seen one before so they were really lucky/unlucky depending on the way you look at it! It was pretty crazy because I started craving shark sightings by the end of it!

They arranged a night snorkel for us too which was really incredible. We went out in groups of 8 with torches. It was like a rave out in the ocean because we all had glow sticks attached to our snorkels so they could keep track of us! The water wasn’t that cold and it was amazing being under the stars – which were out of this world by the way. It was pretty scary at night and we saw a carpet shark camouflaged against a boat wreck which was terrifying because it eyes glowed and you could see it’s hooked teeth! We saw some absolutely huge turtles too which were amazing. On the last day I got up at 5am for the sunrise and went for an early morning snorkel which was the most incredible one of the week. The water was totally still and there were only five of us in the water so the fish were really chilled out and there were loads of them swimming about. When the light hit the water the colours were amazing and it was gorgeous.

The evenings were fun-filled with loads of beach parties and drinking games. It was cool to meet new people from all over the world and I made some really good friends. The middle of the island was one big tropical forest so we would go for late night walks on the trails and get freaked out by the immense numbers of birds around the place.
All in all, the past 10 days have really been immense. This country has so much to offer, it’s great to explore without time constraints. Despite having the best time, it was really nice to come back to college – I was starting to miss everyone! This week filled with far to much work – I have two assignments and one exam. Better get started!

The past few weeks have mainly consisted of lots of uni work and lots of uni nights out so I’ve been getting a real feel for student life over here. This has led me to reflect in some detail on what it means to be a student in Australia.

Despite spending a year abroad here at University, my experiences are very different from the Aussies that are just doing their normal thing.

Firstly, it’s not common to move away from home for University like it is back in the UK. I’m living in a college on campus which is a pretty similar experience to the first year of Uni in Edinburgh but College Life is a lot more structured than Pollock Halls and it has more of a family feel to it as everyone’s really close. There are only 10 colleges on campus, and there are about 200-350 students living in each one. Since it’s not common to move away from home for Uni, the people at college are mostly from small towns in random places that don’t have a University near them. Also, since Aus is a relatively new country, especially in comparison with the UK, Universities over here don’t really have rankings like we do back home so you don’t move away to a ‘better’ school and there’s no above-par academic schools like Oxbridge or Edinburgh 

Since most people live at home with their parents, they tend to stay friends with their mates from high school and don’t have a separate divide from home/uni like we do in the UK. Since I live in a college, I don’t see this side of Australian student culture but you can feel the differences around campus during the week in lectures. These differences are pretty interesting but as an International Student it’s even more different. We integrate pretty well with the Australians at college but we have formed our own groups because we all go travelling at weekends and in school breaks and bond quite a bit then.

I’m still trying to make the most out of college as possible. The soccer season for the girls has just finished – we came joint second overall in the inter-collegiate league which was pretty cool since we weren’t taking it that seriously. We had two matches on the last day which was painful and it was so hot but we won against the most annoying all-girls college so we were pretty stoked. The boys won the overall football cup which was really impressive because they came out of the season totally undefeated. It was highly down to them having four amazing Brits on the team, including one of the Edinburgh First Team boys who’s on exchange out here with me, so that was pretty cool! Now that’s over, I’ve been looking to other activities to fill my time … I doing ‘Dancefest’ which is another inter-collegiate competition where each college does a mini dance show. Rehearsals are going pretty well so I think it’s going to be a success! The weather’s been getting really hot recently too so we’ve been playing quite a bit of Ultimate Frisbee outside in the afternoons with a bunch of people from college which is sweet! There’s a big inter-college ball coming up soon which should be a lot of fun and then my college have a boat cruise down the Brisbane River arranged for a few weeks time too.