When I write this (some of it, at least), it's been 176 days since I arrived at my apartment in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Twenty-five (give-or-take) weeks of navigating the most chaotic, stressful, overwhelming experience of my life. It seems like a nice idea to put some of that experience into words, for my own sake, if nothing else. On that note, I'm going to write this somewhat self-indulgently (I already am), in the kind of way that makes me feel like I'm saying something really interesting and reflective, when perhaps it's not in reality. But hey, I'm the hero of my own story so I can do whatever the hell I like.

Arrival

The first few days of my Year Abroad was such an emotionally intense experience it's difficult to remember. It hadn't even properly hit me what was happening until the last minute - I was focusing too hard on the positives of the preparatory phase: planning, imagining, then spending my last day in the UK in London with my parents and Moon's family, something I'd been looking forward to for a long time! And then, suddenly, comes the reality that this isn't all in my imagination, that everything was going to end as I began my ascent (and subsequent descent) into the Great Unknown. I am of course being a little melodramatic (it's fun!), but it was scary.

Reality didn't really set in though, until I was on board the Boeing 787 in my optimistically booked window seat. I'd never been on an aeroplane this large (it had three rows of seats!), and the in-seat displays displayed my destination of Chicago O'Hare as if both warning and mocking me. I was truly alone here, deprived even of texting, as the plane's Wi-Fi hadn't been turned on yet. Blinking back tears as we took off into the sky was definitely an intense experience.

A few hours later, though, and my optimism had come back thanks to the novelty of it all: the plane had clever automatically dimming windows! I could see a vague outline of Lake Ontario! I was literally going across the world at almost 600 mph. It makes me pity sailors in the olden days even more: they had to deal with the scariness without any gimmicks to soften the blow - it's hard to get that excited about the sea.

Anyway, I was finally in Chicago. No more pissing around, my brain was in action mode ("locked in", as the kids say). Step 1 was to take the Metro, and then a bus, to my hotel. This was the opposite of my flight - emotionally very cool, but practically unpleasant. I couldn't figure out how to use my UK card on the metro ticketing machine, and then navigating 2 heavy suitcases through a small turnstile was a deeply frustrating experience. I also had a somewhat-irrational fear about being mugged at gunpoint in broad daylight in the bus station, as it was in a slightly dingy looking area. With that said, it wasn't all bad: the metro trains and stations run through the central reservation of the highways, which is very cool and novel (but apparently actually quite bad design).

Upon getting to my hotel and navigating some minor faff as they seemed to have lost my booking, I could finally process everything and I just laid in bed and cried for a bit. Then I went to sleep, at about 5pm local time. Then woke up at 2am local time. My hopes of a nice breakfast were dashed when I was too scared to cross a huge road, so I just had a Pop Tart from a vending machine. I took an Uber back to the airport (not going through the public transport ordeal again), to get my coach to Purdue.

~3 hours later and I'm in the blazing sun on campus, with no idea what's really going on. I hadn't really planned this far ahead so I ended up going to the wrong place to pick up my keys. I finally made it, though, and was really impressed by how fancy my apartment looked. I then walked to the "local" (40 minutes away) Walmart to buy some bedding, then collapsed and went to sleep again. I spent the weekend resting and exploring. I tried the dining courts' food, and discovered how annoying it is to walk back to my apartment from campus. The 1 mile section of busy road with no pavement quickly beats the European walking mindset out of you!

A few observations from this period:

- The bathroom stalls really do have gaps in the doors!!! It sucks a lot
- The urinals have water in, and manual flushes? Like a toilet. Why? A mystery to this day.
- I saw a chipmunk and a cardinal. Haven't seen any more since then. Perhaps they were the only ones in the whole city?
- The food delivery robots are a cool gimmick but a bit stupid in practice
- Road signs here are very verbose. UK signs tend to rely much more on symbols whereas here they pretty much tell you what to do. Also there are SO MANY Stop signs.
- Wow it is so hot (around 30 degrees I think?)

Settling Down

At this point I was getting used to being here, ish. My classes had started and were all interesting enough. Lots more homework which was a big change to get used to. I'd made a bit of a tactical error by not going to Boiler Gold Rush, the university's orientation event (as it cost a lot of money and I decided I'd rather have another week at home), so I didn't really know anyone, and at this point, lacked the confidence to go out and meet anyone. I did volunteer to represent Bristol Uni at a Study Abroad Event, where I met the other 2 exchange students from Bristol and we spend a few hours shilling together (get it?).

My roommate also arrived about a week later. He was called Jonny and was Canadian, but had been living in Switzerland for most of his life. Cool guy, we ended up becoming pretty good friends but having a roommate took some getting used to, especially since our sleep schedules clashed a bit (I was going to bed earlier to try and maintain UK cross-compatibility as much as possible). All things considered, it wasn't that bad, but not an experience I'm eager to repeat.

As mentioned, life started to settle down at this point. I remember thinking at one point "I'm basically doing the exact same things I would do in Bristol": go to my classes, study in the library, get food, spend the evening chilling doing nothing in particular. Unfortunately for me at the time, I chose to interpret this in quite a pessimistic way, internally berating myself for "wasting" the experience while simultaneously not feeling confident enough to do much, especially in the way of socialising.

However, my classes were cool! I was very excited to study a wider range of topics, and this has definitely been a real highlight of the experience. In this semester I took 5 classes, which I've ranked in terms of how much I enjoyed them:

Programming Languages

This was a straightforward Computer Science class with nothing particularly unique to speak of, but it matched my interests perfectly. I learned a lot of cool theory, and while it was a difficult class, it was paced well enough that I found I was able to digest everything well.

One cool highlight of this class was learning and using the programming language Dafny, which is different to normal languages in that it has support for formal verification. What this means is that we can formally (i.e. using mathematical statements) write what our code is supposed to do, and Dafny will automatically check that the code we've written does actually do what we say it does! For example, we can write a write a function to reverse a list, and then prove that it does actually reverse the list. If we've written buggy code, Dafny will produce an error, and if we're really lucky, give a counterexample. It's quite challenging to get your head around and work with, but it's very cool.

Social Problems (Sociology)

Cynical as this sounds, perhaps the best part of this class is how incredibly easy it was. The grading was extremely generous to the point where it would be impossible to fail as long as you put in some effort, and it was very easy to get a mark of almost 100% (which I did, with my lowest mark ironically being in the essay I spent the most effort on).

It was also very interesting, despite lectures being held at the ungodly hour of 8:30am. Typically, I can't remember much specific information, but an interesting piece of trivia which stuck with me (you may have heard me talk about this before) is about the demographic-based marketing that soda companies use. For example, Diet Coke / Diet Pepsi is more strongly marketed towards women, who tend to gravitate towards branding based around "light" and "diet" (almost certainly a conditioned behaviour rather than an innate biological difference). On the other hand, Coke Zero and Pepsi Max focus on a more masculine branding. It's clear in the name already, with Zero and Max sounding very edgy and "hardcore". Both drinks also use a sleek black branding, and often market themselves around sports for a similar effect.

This is obviously a reflection of (Western?) societal values rather than "conditioning", but what I find really interesting is that it's a good example of how our societal systems reinforce themselves. Coke Zero was created as a reaction to men being put off by the diet-y branding, but it then became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where our consumer habits reinforce that branding.

Does this mean that fizzy drinks are inherently misogynistic? After all, women can also be sporty and edgy and hardcore too, and plenty of men go on diets. It sounds a bit like a Guardian headline that people on Facebook would furiously complain about, but I think it's an interesting question. A question that unfortunately, I'm not sure of my personal answer to. Tough one. But some fun food for thought.

Governments of the World (Politics)

This class very much put the science in social science. Hell, it even had some maths. It focused on a field of study called comparative politics, which as the name suggests, is quite analytical with the intention of being able to classify and compare different forms of government. We focused a lot on the differences between democracies and dictatorships, and different subcategories of those, and on elections and formation of government.

I unfortunately don't have many detailed fun knowledge tidbits from this class, so I'm just gonna do a bullet point list. Which is probably easier to read than the previous two anyway.

• Civilian dictatorships (one single strong leader and/or a single allowed political party, eg Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, etc), are more likely to last than monarchies (you don't need an example of a monarchy, right?), which are more likely to last than military dictatorships (where the military controls the country, eg Pinochet)
• You may have heard of a coup, but have you heard of a self coup? This is when a democratically elected leader then commits a coup to stay in power. Again, Nazi Germany is the textbook example, but we focused on Fujimori in Peru which is quite an interesting story
• When people vote, they usually either follow a principle of:
  • Retrospective voting: evaluating how well the incumbent has done, and voting based on that (e.g. getting rid of the Tories)
  • Prospective voting: voting based on how well they think the candidates will perform.
  • As far as I'm aware, people tend to favour retrospective voting, often wanting to punish incumbents. This has been especially noticeable recently as virtually every leader/party who was in power over the Covid period has since been voted out, irrespective of ideology. I also think it makes more sense, as people's views don't generally change that much, and many voters aren't even that strongly opinionated so are more likely to go with the thought process of "he was crap" rather than firmly "switching sides".

Elements of Abstract Algebra

Yeah there's not much to say here. It was a maths class, it was difficult. I picked it because I have an interest in the topic for 2 quite silly reasons:

1. It's vaguely incorporated into my favourite programming language
2. It has a lot of clever sounding words like homomorphism and semigroup and principle ideal and I wanted to know what they meant

As the name suggests, this field (group theory) is a very abstract branch of maths, in that it's more like a general way of working with a lot of different mathematical ideas from different applied fields. The whole idea is really "hey, these seemingly unrelated things all have quite a lot of behaviours in common, let's make a general definition for things that behave in this way and then see if we notice anything cool"

What this means is that it was all quite vague, which makes the one piece of applied maths we did quite interesting. It turns out you can use group theory, specifically something called the Orbit-Stabiliser Theorem to answer questions like this: Determine the number of different necklaces we can make using exactly 11 beads of 2 different colours. It's a little trickier than it sounds because you can rotate beads around on the string which is still considered the same necklace.
The answer happens to be 126, which doesn't really matter, but I think it's a cool application of some incredibly vague and abstract maths

Software Engineering

This class sucked. I think I'm cursed when it comes to software group projects, because I had one in Year 2 at Bristol, and one in Year 3 at Purdue, and both times I got quite unreliable group members and overall quite mid grades, despite software engineering being maybe my strongest discipline!

These guys were incredibly unreliable and I could rant for ages about it, but that's probably not very interesting so I'll focus on what did happen: We had an uninspired idea of making an app for local businesses to keep track of their stock and inventories, which had a bit of potential with some suggestion algorithms (which of course we ran out of time to complete), but was overall very boring. We also designed a truly vile looking UI which is kind of the perfect visual metaphor for the whole thing. The course had an insane amount of admin which was deeply frustrating and a weird focus on theory, with us even having to write a few essays as homework?

Overall I did not enjoy this class at all and even with competent teammates it would've been very annoying

The rest of the semester

To be quite honest the rest of the semester was a bit of an underwhelming blur. There were a few cool highlights: I got to go on a free trip to a Go Ape in Indianapolis, I went to a live concert of the Across the Spiderverse soundtrack, and the warm oranges of autumn turned into a real winter with real snow!

I got to experience an authentic (although probably low quality) Thanksgiving dinner from the dining courts, which was pleasant enough but doesn't compare to a British roast in my opinion. The highlight is definitely green bean casserole and pecan pie though which were delicious!

As the end of 2024 approaches, I guess I'll finish off this blog/newsletter/dissertation with just some random things I think are cool.

Cool Songs / Lyrics

You can take it pretty far on a prayer that's pale and synthetic
Bending my crowbar with tension that's telekinetic
A paradox poetic, you get choked up reading the classics
Your pride'll take a gluttonous bite, a stupid question, I'd rather not ask it

This is from the song Crowbar by Waxahatchee, and has been one of my favourite songs and albums for probably close to a year now. I still have no idea what these lyrics actually mean but I think they sound cool and that's what really matters. I wrote a short review of the whole album which you can read here Review: Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood if you're interested!

First Watch / John Taylor's Month Away by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins

A wonderful recommendation by Moon, this song (and of course the whole album) is a really beautiful experience that captures a wonderful blend of melancholy and hope. I particularly like how the album begins as a very stripped back folk album, but then progresses and adds more electronic elements to create a really interesting sound blend

My God by Tapir!

It feels quite Beatles-esque I think but the lyrics mention the Isle of Wight which is the real reason it made it on this list

Interesting Tidbits

• The on-campus currency Dining Dollars seems to exist purely as a tax loophole as far as I can tell, as you don't pay sales tax (VAT) on any purchases made with it.
• The US really doesn't have meal deals and I miss them so much. The cheapest thing I've found is a prepackaged salad from Walmart for about $3.50 - with no drink or snack, and on-campus sandwiches are $6 minimum 😬 It seems like a big oversight, with how common it is to eat out, surely the meal deal loss leader model would be even more successful here?
• The Midwest / Great Plains is almost incomprehensibly flat! The entire 2-3 mile commute from my apartment to campus is entirely flat. If the town wasn't built near a river, I doubt there would be any elevation changes for miles - as soon as you're out of the built up area it's just flat farmland for as far as the eye can see, it's very surreal

• Pedestrian crossings are very weird because they'll signal that it's safe to walk, even though drivers will have a green light to turn onto the crossing, and they're just supposed to give way to you. It's quite scary at first and seems quite unreliable if you ask me
• Also jaywalking is not all it's hyped up to be, it doesn't make you feel like a daredevil sadly
• It's very funny how enthusiastic the college culture is. Purdue students are known as Boilermakers for some quirky historical reasons, and the Boiler branding is everywhere. Looking for societies to join? Use BoilerLink. Need to do 2-factor authentication to sign into Microsoft Outlook? BoilerKey. You think your accommodation is called an apartment? Wrong! It's a Boiler Apartment. There's even a damn steakhouse called Boilerhouse. My favourite was one of my lecturers saying the catchphrase Boiler Up! incredibly monotonically at the end of every lecture
• On a similar note, it's astounding how high budget and ubiquitous the university is. Pretty much the entire town of West Lafayette is Purdue. There's one or two official Purdue merch and book stores. There are Purdue-owned and branded restaurants and even a fancy hotel. The main road through the town is named after one of the Presidents of the university. The entire local economy is held up by this one institution, it's so crazy.
• Also, it's pronounced pur-doo (with an unstressed u), not pur-due which initially sounded horrible and American but is much more natural sounding I think now

To be Continued!

Anyway, I think that's all for now. At the time of writing now it's been 218 days, which is a little embarrassing that it took me 6 weeks to finish this, but hopefully it'll speed up from here. It's March now, so I have a lot of tales from my second semester that I'm excited to tell. I've also tried to keep this post quite compartmentalised - only including my thoughts from the time period I'm describing - which is quite difficult! So, as I said, future editions should be shorter, and quicker.

I quite like the idea of making this a regular thing I do, even if the current title quickly becomes redundant. I'm going to try and get into the habit of noting down any interesting observations, thoughts, and experiences I have and putting them in here, which is what I really want to focus on rather than it being purely autobiographical, but you know, you've just got to go with the flow with art, dude, you can't force it.

And so with that, dear reader, I will say goodbyeeee and thank you for reading this far! I appreciate your patience and investment (granted I'd imagine, or at least hope, that anyone I send this to would be invested enough in my life to read it, but you never know) and would love to hear some feedback! See you <3