Looks Like College

Introduction
I thought it looked like college. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, I applied to I think it was 12 other schools, I had no idea exactly what I wanted, but I knew I wanted a medium sized school. When I came here, it just felt like what college is supposed to be like. And it’s gorgeous.

I came and stayed with a friend of a friend who went here and I met all of her friends and I really liked them, everyone was so nice to me, but I hadn’t heard about all the preppy stuff of Miami.

Oxford - it’s a really small town. I think it would be nothing without the university. It actually wasn’t anything before the university was here.

I think that as a whole, it’s upper-middle class and so there’s a lot that you don’t experience. They talk about diversity at this school and while there is diversity, it’s still generally I think within the same class and so there’s a lot that you don’t experience.

There are a lot of preppy kids but then there are also a lot of kids that are pretty much everything else that you can find and I also think that people are really accepting. I feel like everyone can dress the way they want and it’s cool. It’s not like high school.

It’s not like they’re necessarily pretentious. I think—At least everybody that I’ve met is really nice. I love the school, I love the people. I think the people are what make this school.

Most of my friends are either from my dorm freshman year. My friends are mostly either from freshman year or from my sorority. I met so many people through that and then also people through classes and clubs and stuff like that, but most of them are from freshman year and from sorority.

Campus Life and Social Life
I’ve done Habitat for Humanity for the last—well, I did it for the first two years and then I went abroad so I didn’t do it last year. I did tutoring programs that the school has set up and programs that this school does through tutoring for elementary schools.

I went to London. I didn’t go with Miami’s program, I went with Boston University’s, but Miami has a huge library and just tons of resources so you can pretty much find where you want to go...They have Luxembourg, they have a center over in Luxembourg, which is a great experience for people who want to do that. You live with families over there and you get a lot of opportunities to travel and stuff.

But I knew that I wanted to go to London. And since Miami doesn’t have a center there, they were helpful in helping me to find a program that would be suitable for me and that had my major that would transfer credits.

Overall I think studying abroad was the best decision that I made. It was probably the hardest decision that I’ve made since I’ve been at school because it’s so hard to leave your friends and you think, “nobody’s going to remember me when I come back” and “where’s my place going to be in all the clubs and stuff that you’re leaving. But it was an amazing experience. It opened my mind so much.

I traveled an awful lot when I was abroad and met so many people, talked to them, how they view Americans…And getting to see so many places. I just feel like I became so much more cultured.

And for my major it was an amazing experience because I actually did an internship program and I took classes for 5 weeks in London and then an internship for 8 weeks. Academics
I’m a psych major, but I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go to medical school or if I wanted to do graduate school in a doctorate program for psychology. And so I got to work in a hospital in London with a bunch of psych patients—it was like families and stuff like that.

And they don’t have as many restrictions in the UK as we do in the US, so I was able to get hands-on experience that I wouldn’t be allowed to do without at least a masters in the United States. And it helped me to decide that I would rather go into psychology than go to medical school.

I think the professors are kind of a mix. It depends who you get. Some of the professors are certainly more centered on their own experiences; working on their own books or their own theses, or their own research projects.

But I’ve had a lot of really great professors who have been extremely helpful to me. I have a lot of big classes, I take a lot of science classes that are just the big lecture classes and I make it a point to go and meet all of my professors, talk to them, try to make it to some of their office hours.

But they’ve all been so accommodating if you need to take some extra time to do a test or to write a paper they’ve been so helpful. Or if you’re just not getting a concept or you need them to go over things, they really go out of their way and they’ll stay late, make the hours, whatever it is. Email back and forth and if you want a practice test or something like that, they’ll take the time to make something like that for you.

I think a lot of the classes I’ve had are big, so I haven’t gotten to know my professors on a really personal level. I think that depends a lot on your major and what classes you’re taking because some people I know have gone to their professor’s houses for dinners and stuff like that and I don’t know any of my professors that well.

I also do research with actually 2 professors in the psychology department. They’ve been so helpful to me, helping me decide what I possible might want to do, looking into graduate school programs. Helping me write grants so that I can get money to support for my own research. Being able to do an honors thesis and all of this.

Things that I would have had no idea to even think about doing, but I just randomly talked to a couple of professors. It’s like, “I’m interested in research,” and then they kind of just take you on that whole path. So it opened a whole new world to me.

Freshman year I think I had more TA’s than I had later. I think I had one in English Freshman year and that just wasn’t a very good experience. They’re busy doing a lot of other things for themselves too, but it wasn’t a very difficult course so it didn’t really mater much for me.

I have had some TA’s who are extremely helpful and they’re closer to your age and they know more exactly what you’re going through because they’ve kind of just been there. And so they’ve been helpful at telling us what you know, how they made their decisions for the path that they’re taking and helping us find things to look at and joking around with us and stuff like that.

So, I’ve really liked some of the TA’s that I have and I think they’ve made the experience better. I’ve had more problems with science professors not speaking English and just not being able to understand pretty much every other word and everyone in the class, “What are they talking about?” And then you figure, “oh, ‘Vector’, we thought he was saying ‘Water’” what is that?

But the professors are certainly nice and if you go up and talk to them, sometimes they’re just nervous and whenever they’re nervous AND they have this accent it makes it all that much worst, but you can always figure things out.

Student Body
I kind of felt that the first two weeks was like camp. I was like, “I’m in a strange place, and I’m sleeping in a place that doesn’t feel like my bed. I don’t know who any of these people are. They don’t know me, they don’t know my family, but after that 2 weeks passed, I think you kind of got to know all the other people and then that made it feel like home because you had all these other people going through the same things as you.

But I didn’t have a problem adjusting to the school itself being in a small town because I think, I’m very focused on academics too, so it’s not like I was missing the sky scrapers and all that. It feels like it’s a place centered around Academia.

There are a lot of people who find people that they want to date and then there’s also people who just decide they would rather just be promiscuous…I think you find what you’re looking for. I think Greek is a huge part of Miami and it always has been. I think it’s a strength of the school so I hope that it stays that way. It adds a lot to the social life. It adds a lot to the philanthropy, it adds a lot to I think people feeling like they belong.

We don’t have houses sorority houses for the girls makes it more so that we’re a cohesive whole of a Greek community than it is that we’re fighting between houses.

I have a lot of a lot of friends that are in different sororities and so I don’t hate them because I know so many people that are in there it’s more like me joining a sorority opened up doors for me to meet all my other friends in their different sororities.

Greek week, all the events that you get to do. I think it does, at the same time, add a lot to the party scene. I guess people do hook up a lot at the parties and stuff, but again, that’s more of people’s choices.

I would like to say that it doesn’t really matter if you’re Greek or not. But I have friends and housemates that aren’t Greek and it was a huge struggle for them when everybody else was going through recruitment. I think it becomes something that everybody’s so centered on that people do feel left out if they’re not part of it.
Generally it’s just people who choose not to be part of it, it’s very rarely that you try to get into it and you can’t.

In Closing...
I think that you need to have something at this school that you can identify with. And so if you’re not going to be very involved in SOMETHING, I know people who are really involved in Habitat for Humanity and they’re not really involved in anything else, but that’s where their friends are and that’s where their social life comes from, that’s where’ they’re planning things and that’s where they’re putting their time into and so it’s okay for them that they’re not involved in Greek life.

But if you don’t have anything else to take the place of that, then it is something you’re going to feel is a loss because you won’t feel like you have a place necessarily in the school.

I think that it might be less Greek and more of finding what is right for you. One of my friends started to do club basketball and it took her awhile, but then she got into it and she loves it and that’s where her friends are and she puts so much time into it, travels a lot with it.

So she doesn’t notice as much that she’s not going to the theme parties and to Chapter and all of that whenever we’re doing all of our sorority stuff. But she did, for awhile feel really left out whenever we all had things to do and she didn’t.