When my best friend moved to the US in August 2016, I made big plans for the time I would visit her here. She studied in Penn State University and I had planned road trips and hikes in the Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah even before she got here. The added twist to it was when Shahrukh Khan’s son started studying in the University of Southern California, and I made plans to attend USC’s commencement ceremonies just so I could see Shahrukh Khan, and then head to Yosemite from there after a beautiful drive along CA1.
My plans for America were pretty much from a vacation standpoint. I had never considered education in the States as one of my options because I was committed to moving to the UK. That’s where I saw myself studying and meaningfully changing my career track. I had all my dream universities well-researched and listed out. My “back up” or secondary options of study were all in Canada. Now when I think about it, I really don’t know why I did not consider America as one of my primary academic destinations.
But as luck/ destiny/ life would have it, I applied to one university here in the US and the rest is history. How this happened is a story for another time.
I moved to College Station, Texas in August 2018. I’ve made some amazing friends here and I’ve had the privilege of taking classes taught by professors who are revered around the world. My experience in the US was definitely molded by people I had no idea existed before I came here. I came here not knowing anyone, and today I have a huge number of people I call friends. I have thoroughly enjoyed the way people work here. I love how people are open to different cultures and embrace differences. I love how interested people are in really knowing who you are. I give full credit to my American classmates who made my time here so good. They were the face of America for me and they did a great job at it!
My time here has allowed me to grow significantly. I learned to deal with bed bugs the first week that I got here. I learned that people would trade their lives but not their SSNs here, and that we take our Aadhar and PAN numbers rather casually back home. I finally experienced that the days are longer in the Summer and nights are longer in the Winter here. What the textbooks told us back in primary school was true after all. I realized that I should have just listened to mom when she asked me to at least watch what was cooking the week before I got here. I was sound theoretically. I knew the ratio to cook rice, of course. That’s easy, right? But that’s the funny part. I had never cooked rice until I got here and I used logic to decide what 1 was and what 2 was in the 1:2 Rice and Water ratio. I realized that hunger and food were always separated by time; I either had to cook or place an order. It was all so simple at home. There would be something all the time. I still wonder how. But that’s the best part about learning and practice — I can now multi-task in the kitchen when I can make a full meal in under 25 minutes as opposed to the initial minimum 2 hour lead time. I never knew that Hebbar’s Kitchen and Youtube would become the most used apps on my phone one day.
I also realized that travelling or vacationing during the Masters program just had to be one of the most demanding tasks of all time. It required you to literally alter your pace of assignment submissions, heavily motivate and coordinate your teams, constantly compare air tickets on multiple websites on different dates incognito. I resorted to travelling only during my semester breaks. I always looked forward to it. Visiting cities and travelling here has been an absolute delight!
I came here to pursue an MS in Marketing at Texas A&M University. I need to wait to see if what I learned is really paying off. But I do know that moving to the US and living by myself helped me learn to cook, run errands, study, and catch the bus on time. No matter what part of India I continued to be, I know I would have had someone or something to always fall back on. Here, I learned resilience; I learned to persevere; I learned to be more patient; and I learned that it is always going to be okay.
I have loved my time here in America. It has only been 2 years. It feels like I got here yesterday but it also feels like I got here eons ago. I’m excited to see what it’s going to be like in the times to come. I do plan to make all of my hikes, road trips and other travel plans come to life. But above all, I’m eagerly looking forward to the time I bring Thatha here just so he can say something like Coorg is better that California!
This is my story of America and I.