It’s my first snowing experience today. It has been three months since I have been to US for my PhD. I thought of writing the my experience not expecting someone will read it or somebody will be benefit from this writing, but to my own reference expecting this writing will give me nice memory someday.
Life
First of all life in US, since I don’t know the exact meaning of the word ‘life’, I may write things not align with your understanding of term life. This is about how I feel life in US. It’s easy as far as you get it easy. Being an alien to here I always felt I miss the great time in my life, because I miss my family, friends and all good and bad experiences back in my mother country Sri Lanka. But I must write here that nice people who were around me help me to feel that I didn’t miss all of those.
The quality of living is very high standard compared to my experience. Especially transportation, normally it took 1 hour and 15 minutes to go to my office which is 17km away from my home back in SL. But it is about 10 to 12 minutes’ drive in here. That is a major thing that we (as sri lankan’s) should consider. We should not let people waste their time in the road on fully loaded buses in huge traffic. Hopefully this issue will be resolved at least within next 10 years.
Fun
Yeah it’s fun, fun to be here as long as we can balance all things in life. Within last three months I visited three major attractions in US. First one was mammoth cave (One of the largest cave system in the world). Second one was Virginia and third one was Washington DC. I visited Norfolk harbor during my visit to Virginia, there were more than 30 war ships which belongs to US Navy. It was a great experience. I wish if we could have one such ship for my country. During my visit to Washington I visited white house which is not big as I thought.
Education
In terms of education student have full freedom to do what they want. Unlike in SL student are not restricted to specific area of study even when they doing their undergrad degree. Our system has restrictions for university students to explore what they want. You can’t take whatever subjects you want in the university, if you are there to do computer science you have to follow very restricted curriculum and earn the degree, but in US you can experiment yourself, you can take subjects from phycology department, business school and also from computer science department, after experimenting yourself then you select your major. I think this is a good system since just after doing advance level it is not possible to select what you want to do? Since school education is totally different from university education.
Culture
This is where the major conflict comes. Culture is totally different. It’s different from every aspects of it such as clothes, relationships, life style etc… . But still I love my culture.
