It has now been over an year that I have been living in USA and the time calls for me to sit back reflect on the past year.
I came here with dreams of a fabulous America of the movies and was immediately both elated and disappointed. Airports did look like from an alien place bustling with activity and people in those characteristic vibrant colors and then stepping out from the airport as you reach towards the heart of the city you expect tall building and people moving around like crazy, yellow cabs and neon signs everywhere. Well, i didn't find any and realised that what we see in movies is but a minuscule part of USA. Nevertheless, the small apartments in large buildings are served with the best of facilities- with wall-to-wall carpeting, air-conditioning, microwaves and dishwashers being standard features (a luxury by my standard of living in India). University campuses are lush green with trees and flowers- almost making you believe you are in one of those Yash raj pictures and on certain given days you can see the scenes of American pie enacted in reality.
Personally, I have grown to understand the nuances of statistics learning statistical packages at no ends. Developed a keen sense of epiemiology (K, I will keep those lines for my SOP). To say that I was taken aback by the class atmosphere is an understatement. Here I am dressed in a formal shirt and a trouser assuming graduate school to be a place where professors would want you to be in the your best presentable form, and I see people coming in to classes in shorts and slippers with their Lunches and dinners!!!
They would rip open packets of chips in the middle of a class, open bottles of coke or just much away biting into apples creating quite a ripple in the class, but strangely nobody used to notice it except me. If that is not enough to startle you, how about you calling the professor by his first name and actually stopping the professor in the middle of the class and asking him a question, to which he replies promptly, and if dissatisfied by his answer you could disagree and openly express it. Now some of would consider it to be taking the student teacher relationship to height of informality but it work. I could get what the professor was saying and did not have to go home and read. Another strange thing that is characteristic of the education here is that books are more or less not wanted- didn't have to sit up one night before the exam getting it my head. Can I ever disregard the "Cheat sheet", my maths teacher from school would faint if she came to know that you could take a sheet with all the formulas on a piece of paper into a exam!
You can see people running and that is not just in the morning or evening, but anytime of the day. I thought that would be because the sun is available for only a small part of the year, but I could see people running out even when it was running or even snow paved all the paths. People are very keen to maintain their health and age is no bar, with even 60 year olds running their heart out. Even in sports you would assume that there will be separate leagues for guys and gals, I was surprised when I was told that its a co-ed sports sports event I had to take part in. I ascribed it to the open mindedness of people in USA and immediately was sympathetic for gals considering them weaklings, but I was to be proved wrong when the gals outran me in skills and in stamina on the field actually making me feel sub-standard. That they were aggressive is proven that I was hit in the face, kicked from behind, elbowed and the most painful of all- hit in the nuts- all by gals. But that is only one part of the country as I can see people who are more than the twice the most obese person I have seen in my country. If they sit on a two seat on a bus, you cannot squeeze in with them. Inspite of being so pathologically obese they just end up eating more. Two sides of America of date. The weekend culture is one thing to relish, work hard for 5 days from 8am to 5pm and then take two days off, and people are in the offices at 8 am in the morning punctual to the 'T' and making it a point to inform others if they were going to get late by even 15 minutes. I have been trying to get there on time but have made a name for myself in being fashionably late to almost all events possible. The best one was when I was late for a formal dinner event by just one hour, and had more than 50 faces staring at me when I did enter the hall.
How many people did you see or talk to in a day in India? No count right? Here I can count the number of people I talk to in a day on my fingers. Being deficient of a social circle does play on you as it is not easy to deal with this after living in a country where people are so intrusive that they would want to know the day you broke your first tooth, if possible.
How I make do for that is by getting on to the net for 24*7 and pinging anybody and everybody I may find online. I have started to be known as online singh. Being on net and a laptop is a feature of life here, and all the assignments and exams I have got till date has ensured that I get more and more used to it. Nothing to be accepted in hand written format, only typed assignments. I wonder when was the last time I wrote anything by hand or lifted a pen. All this has bode well for me as I have met many a people online and on social networking websites who have become very up and close, some I havent even seen in real life ever. But I also have messed up my eyes along with it, all those years of studying in MBBS did not weaken my eyes but 6 months into USA and I have spectcles on my face.
The weather is another part that needs a mention, I had read about it in books about england where people carry an umbrela everytime and the saying, " If you dont like the weather, wait for an hour and it will change" is true. I dont know about England in reality but it is certainly true for this place. You need to check the weather forecast everyday as it changes like a chameleon changing color. It would be a bright sunny morning when you leave the house but by the time its lunch time, the clouds must have already cried their hearts out. Like today, I came out of the home without checking the weather and so now its raining out there and I donot have an umbrella with me. My language has changed, I have an accent, I say " you know like" in very sentence.
That is it for now, I have much more to say- but that is for later.
Dr Prabhjot Singh
MBBS, MPH (EPI) 2009 Candidate
Saint Louis University
