By Laura Ercolani
According to International Journal of Scientometrics, Infometrics and Bibliometrics, the total number of universities in the world is 17,036. This huge number leads to a wide range of choices for your future, and even if in the past was normal to attend a college in your homeland, in the last few years the decision to study abroad has become more frequent.
Different countries mean different lifestyle, and different type of teaching, even in equally developed countries such as United States of America and Italy. These two countries aim for the same goal for their students: prepare them for their future jobs as good as possible. Despite this, Italy and America have different histories and different cultures and this leads to some changes in the way of thinking and teaching.
The Italian approach to teaching is more theoretical, starting from the high school, it’s based on mnemonic study and a lot of different notions, and it becomes practical only for specific subjects, while in the US the concepts are often explained with practical experiments and demonstrations. Also, the choice of college is faced in different ways because Italy is a smaller county and even if most of the students leave their birthplace to go to a bigger city with better universities, they still live quite near from their parents and often visit them during the weekend. In the US the choice to go faraway is quite granted and even if you go to a college near your house, you will still be living with a roommate in a dorm. This aspect causes a deep difference between the countries’ college lifestyle, even if both of them can have positive and negative sides.
In addiction to these opposite ways of structuring universities, also the life schedule and rhythm change in many ways, as we can see from the two experiences of Tanja Moronge and Chiara Ercolani, two students who attend respectively the Boston University and the Polytechnic of Milan.
According to International Journal of Scientometrics, Infometrics and Bibliometrics, the total number of universities in the world is 17,036. This huge number leads to a wide range of choices for your future, and even if in the past was normal to attend a college in your homeland, in the last few years the decision to study abroad has become more frequent.
Different countries mean different lifestyle, and different type of teaching, even in equally developed countries such as United States of America and Italy. These two countries aim for the same goal for their students: prepare them for their future jobs as good as possible. Despite this, Italy and America have different histories and different cultures and this leads to some changes in the way of thinking and teaching.
The Italian approach to teaching is more theoretical, starting from the high school, it’s based on mnemonic study and a lot of different notions, and it becomes practical only for specific subjects, while in the US the concepts are often explained with practical experiments and demonstrations. Also, the choice of college is faced in different ways because Italy is a smaller county and even if most of the students leave their birthplace to go to a bigger city with better universities, they still live quite near from their parents and often visit them during the weekend. In the US the choice to go faraway is quite granted and even if you go to a college near your house, you will still be living with a roommate in a dorm. This aspect causes a deep difference between the countries’ college lifestyle, even if both of them can have positive and negative sides.
In addiction to these opposite ways of structuring universities, also the life schedule and rhythm change in many ways, as we can see from the two experiences of Tanja Moronge and Chiara Ercolani, two students who attend respectively the Boston University and the Polytechnic of Milan.
Moronge’s typical day starts at 7.40 am with the lecture, followed by breakfast, class and lunch with her friends, during the afternoon she usually goes to the gym and at night she hangs out with her friends again. She knows that other countries have different college lifestyles, but she doesn’t want to change because in some places students must choose their major degree in high school, whereas in the US you “can easily switch more than one time, there’s more freedom”. She is also really happy about her college choice because Boston is a big beautiful city but it’s not overwhelming and BU is like a little community. Moronge thinks that live far from the family can be good, but sometimes “when you feel the urge to go home you should be able to do that”, so living too far can be damaging. Even if she likes living and studying in BU, she wants to spend a year abroad for her minor degree in French and she thinks that this opportunity that her university offers is really useful and enriching.
Ercolani’s typical day starts at 7 am instead, she goes immediately to her university and she leaves it only at 7 pm, she usually takes a break of one hour to have lunch. She studies engineering and she has a really busy schedule, with an amount of 35 hours of classes per week. She knows that in other countries people don’t spend so much time in class, but she would like to study abroad for her master degree not because of the diversity of time management but because of the different learning and teaching approach. Ercolani’s choice of college “was pretty obvious” because in her homeland colleges are not as expensive as in the US and the bachelor degree there takes only three years, whereas if she had studied in the US she would have had to take some general courses that she had already taken in her last high school’s year. She still lives with her family because her college is situated in Milan, where her parents live, and “moving just for the sake of going away from home would have been quite pointless”, despite this she thinks that is extremely important to learn to live away from the family, in fact when she was 16 she spent a year abroad. Ercolani is happy about her choice and she wouldn’t change it, but she definitely wants to spend a semester or an entire year abroad, and her school also offers a double degree program that lets people spend two years in a foreign university. In her opinion going abroad is really important to “get to do new experiences and broaden the horizons” and it can definitely leads people to find more opportunities and innovative and different projects and cultures.