By Ashlyn Wiebalck, News Correspondent
While her freshman peers were exploring the International Village (IV) sushi bar in September, English major Sarah DiCioccio was after a different sort of global experience.
DiCiocccio was in Ireland as part of NUin, studying at Dublin Business School. Unlike a conventional start to freshman year, these students spend their first semester as Northeastern students studying abroad, as opposed to living and taking classes on the main Boston campus.
“The main difference with that is that there is no campus,” DiCioccio said. “We lived a 30 minute walk away from our classes and we lived in the National College of Ireland. We took classes at Dublin Business School and there were two separate communities. Our hours were also a lot different. We were basically in school every day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. You could have a break, but there was no way you could possibly go home because we were studying so far away.”
As the spring semester begins, new Northeastern students are making their way to campus for the first time. Despite starting a few months later, these students are making the transition to college much like students traditionally do in the fall.
Aside from the differences in the structure of a typical school day, students also had to adjust to new living situations in their respective countries of study. These new living adjustments carried through with the students as they made their way back to Northeastern’s campus.
NUin collaborates with four partner institutions in four different countries worldwide: Australia, Costa Rica, England and Greece. Students are assigned to a country according to their major or area of study. For some students, studying abroad posed a new set of challenges that differed from traditional schooling in the United States.
“For me especially, the move to college was a lot different because we stayed with host families in Costa Rica, so I have to get used to living in a dorm in general,” said freshman undeclared major Mitchell Gruber.
Despite the differences in when and where they started their studies, new students this semester experienced many of the same activities freshmen encountered during Welcome Week last fall.
“Our first few days we had a bunch of activities scheduled for us, such as sports games and ice skating,” said freshman international business major Chandra Kumar, who also studied in Costa Rica. “I think that there’s definitely enough welcoming activities because you can pick and choose what you want to do depending on your interests.”
Although Northeastern provides orientation programs to accommodate the newly arriving students, some still express concerns about meeting new people and adjusting to new social situations.
“When everyone’s a freshman together, no one knows anyone and everyone’s in the same boat,” DiCioccio said. “Everyone’s meeting each other and wants to make friends. If I could change anything, it would be somehow getting us involved with people who have already been here.”
Gruber agreed an introduction to students who came in the fall would make the transition easier.
“There’s not that whole introductory couple of weeks where everybody’s trying to meet everybody. By the time Jan-start students get here, everybody knows their friends already and so it makes it a little more difficult to meet people,” Gruber said. “It would be helpful to get contact information of just some people in the dorm that maybe I can meet or try to get to know a little bit before coming to campus.”
Despite the new challenges faced by students adjusting from NU in to Northeastern campus life, many try to focus on the more positive aspects of this transition.
“I feel like we face the same challenges that fall start students did when they first got here,” Kumar said. “So although we face those challenges later, at the same time we have this incredible experience under our belts from studying abroad this first semester.”
