There’s something that tends to happen every Saturday morning in my house.

In our respective rooms, we wake up early, usually to the sound of one another’s stirrings. Someone goes to the bathroom, brushes his or her teeth, starts to get ready. Eventually, when we’re all awake and have our doors open, one of us will emerge, hair tousled, eyes lidded with sleep, and say, “So, how was your night?”

Although my housemates and I usually begin our evenings at the same party, we often drift off our own ways, either to other parties, back to our rooms, or to other people’s rooms. Asking what happened last night is the process of filling in the gaps, and our answers vary: sometimes we’ll talk about who we hung out with or ran into, and sometimes we’ll talk about who we hooked up with.

[International student opinions on partying at U.S. colleges]

It’s funny to think that hooking up – something that now seems so ordinary and so ingrained in my university’s party culture – used to be wholly unfamiliar to me. Prior to coming to the U.S., I had never heard or known of the concept.

A completely different culture

I grew up in a culture where sex definitely happened, but was never discussed. You didn’t talk about sex or physical desires, and you never saw any hints of it on TV or the media.

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What is behind all this school spirit?

When I first arrived at the University of Maryland, and for many weeks after, I was bemused by the number of students who walked around dressed from head to toe in clothing with our university’s name on it, and by the volume of merchandise in the university bookstore that features our mascot, Testudo the terrapin.

The weeks went by, and every day you could guarantee that at least 50% of the students on campus would be wearing at least one garment of University of Maryland attire. It wasn’t just the students – I saw their parents sporting large ‘M’ bumper stickers on their cars, and even younger siblings wearing Maryland red.

The university that you choose to attend in England is something to be proud of – most of us worked hard to get there and try to make the most of the experience – but at the end of the day it is just a university: a place to earn a degree, to meet friends, and to introduce you to another way of life.

Here in College Park, going to the University of Maryland is not merely an academic or a social choice – it is a way of life.

I remember one of the first orientation seminars I had when I arrived in Maryland, during which they played us a video showing a sea of red-clad students singing along to the Maryland victory song. They didn’t seem at all reserved or self-conscious to be professing so publicly their love for their educational institution.

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Studying in the States has offered me many worthwhile experiences. I have learned a great deal both inside and outside the classroom, and have made numerous life-long friends.

There have been certain negative aspects of life here as a student, though. They are learning experiences too, but, at the same time, even after more than three years here, I find it difficult to digest some practices among some of my fellow-students.  The commemoration of April 20th as a celebration of marijuana is one of those practices.

Yesterday was “4/20,” as Americans call it. In the U.S., the number of the month precedes the number of the day of the month when writing out dates, so the 20th of April this year is not 20.4.2011 as it would be in other parts of the world, but “4/20.”

Pi Day pies (Creative commons photo by Flickr user Dennis Wilkinson)

The Americans have cute and creative ways of commemorating certain dates. For example, they designate the n-th Friday or Monday of a month as a public holiday, thereby guaranteeing a three-day weekend every year.

“3/14” (again, the 14th of March) is marked by students and mathematicians as “Pi Day,” which celebrating the geometrical constant π, as its decimal form begins “3.14…” I once heard an Australian, I believe it was, complain that “Pi Day” should really be the 22nd of July, as pi is often noted as “22/7” as a ratio.

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