Tag: Life @ GW

By gwblogabroad

I was talking with another girl from France studying at GW this year and I realized one thing about GW, everybody is very positive about ... well, pretty much everything.

Let me give you an example. I made the terrible mistake of taking a marathon class (and I am really not an athlete). Every week, since I run much slower than the rest of the class, I lose my group (literally, I lose them). Usually when I am finally back at the gym after running 45 minutes everybody has left for about ten minutes. During the fourth class I tried to run faster and most people from my group were waiting in front of the gym when I arrived. Strangely when I joined them, one boy high-fived me saying "Good job!".

Two things about that:

1) First, he was not the instructor so I did not understand why I felt he had to encourage me.

2) I arrived 10 minutes after everybody else and I did not run as far as them (I had turned around after 20 minutes not to be too late). Not really what I would call a good job.

I realized that everybody is always very encouraging in all of my classes. Professors always say "good question" or "this is a very interesting comment". Even when I bake, the few people that are courageous enough to eat the mixture I cook seem to feel forced to say "this is absolutely delicious" when, really,  "this is edible" would be enough considering how bad a cook I am.

In France, and particularly at my school, things are very different. Even when you are attending a lecture of several hundred people and the professor encourages people to ask questions, if you dare doing so to ask a question not very original, the professor might humiliate you in front of everybody answering that your question is stupid (which often leads to nobody ever daring asking a question).

Since I am used to having very tough teachers, I did not know people at GW expect as many positive remarks as negative remarks when they ask for a critique. For instance, I had to write a one-page critique for every short-story the students from my "Fiction Writing" class had written. I started writing very negative critiques until I received the critiques from the other students in my class about my own story. All were very positive with only a few criticisms. Besides, my teacher mentioned "critiques should not be all negative or mean." Oops.

Is one technique better than the other? We have a saying in France, "qui aime bien chattie bien", which basically means that you are tough with people you appreciate. I tend to be in favor of harsh criticisms because I think they made me progress more. Yet, my friend was arguing that being that negative about everything encourages self-censorship and goes against creativity. I'll let you take sides while I start packing to go back to the country with the highest percentage of people thinking the future will be worse than the present. Negativity, you said?

By gwblogabroad

In case some of you did not notice, the last couple of weeks were full of anniversaries: GW's 100 years in Foggy Bottom and George Washington's 223rd birthday. Even before that, I had noticed how dear George Washington was to the university. You run into his bust almost every block. Yet those events were a good opportunity to learn a little bit more about American traditions.

1) S'mores:

This is probably the best thing the US have ever invented (after the Internet of course). I was familiar with marshmallows like anybody who went to summer camps. Yet I had never eaten s'mores. The idea is simple: biscuit- chocolate-marshmallow-chocolate. The result is simply delicious. Too bad we discovered that only in February and I don't have a fireplace to make them at home. My only complaint: there should really be a seminar on how to make them at the beginning of the semester because chances are you won't be able to make them properly the first time you try.

2) Bonfire: 

An orchestra, a giant fire and a George Washington mascot... I keep wondering what it would look like if this happened in Paris next to my home university, Sciences Po. This is for me the main difference a campus make. We would never have such social events in France. Firstly, this would mean blocking a whole street and probably starting a fire considering how  narrow the streets are. Secondly, inhabitants of the seventh district of Paris would fear that young people from the "banlieues" are coming to attack their neighborhood. Finally, the sound of an orchestra playing would probably make people think it's July 14th or the Gay Pride demonstrating early this year (which would be stupid because it's 30°F in France right now so half-naked dancers would be freezing).

3) The Legendary George:

I did not know about Presidents Day before it actually happened, although I wondered why someone had put a hat on George's head near Foggy Bottom metro. After I realized this meant I wouldn't have a test in my investigative reporting class on Monday - which made me pretty happy - I looked up on Wikipedia what was the meaning of this holiday. As it turns out, Americans celebrate their presidents' birthdays, especially Washington's and Lincoln's. It is not a shock that great figures of history are important in the US. In France, less so. First, we don't usually celebrate dead people's birthday but dead people's ... death day. Above all, I don't think everybody would feel comfortable celebrating Napoleon's birthday for example. Among other things, he is the author of a text that said: "Husbands must protect their wives, wives must be obedient to their husband". Let's just say that feminists would not be thrilled to celebrate Napoleon's birthday. On the contrary, in the US, especially at GW that was named after George, history is still very sacred. Busts of Presidents are everywhere and politicians still refer to the Founding Fathers to defend certain ideas or object to reforms.

All of this to say that there is more than an ocean that separates France and the United States.

By gwblogabroad

There it is: we have found a way to make hundreds of loud and rude college students inoffensive. It is not the most elegant way but it is efficient. An epidemic.

It started at the beginning of the week. You ate somewhere, you touched something and before you knew, you had it. You felt nauseated and after a couple of hours you received an email from the university:

"The George Washington University Student Health Service is currently seeing an increased number of students with gastrointestinal symptoms, most likely of a viral origin.”

“No. No. NOOO” is your first reaction. Now that you are facing the truth, you have to tell your friends you won’t be able to brunch with them tomorrow.

You continue reading the email:

“While symptoms can be uncomfortable, gastrointestinal illness is usually not serious and most people get better in one to two days.  There is no drug treatment or vaccine for gastrointestinal illness.”

Well, this is the polite equivalent of: “Don’t bother coming to see us. There is no cure. And we don’t want to get sick too”. Never mind, you are brave, you will bare the consequences of touching door handles irresponsibly. You will just go to sleep and hope you will not die in painful circumstances.

Wait. The email is not over:

"The university is working with the DC Department of Health and is currently awaiting the outcome of testing to determine the cause of the infections.  The university is also working to identify any commonalities in the cases at GW.  No single commonality has been identified to date."

Are we talking about the plague? I am not even sure we have health service at my home university so an investigation about the causes of the epidemic seems a little bit disproportionate. If we think about it for a second, they are basically hiring people to find the cause of a disease that is not serious and for which there is no cure anyway.

They finally found the origin of the epidemic: it is a norovirus. That doesn’t help us much, but it is way more elegant than saying that you have gastrointestinal symptoms. Yet, during the next few days, you still see one friend after another being trapped in his or her room, like soldiers dying on the battlefield.

There are two possible scenarios now:

1) People will get better, fewer and fewer will get sick and life will be happy and healthy again.

2) This is the beginning of the end of the world foreseen in 2012.

Right now, it's 50-50 given that every office at GW has turned paranoiac and is cleaning every inch touched by a student. But let's not be pessimistic, if we survived the bird flu, we will probably survive the norovirus.

By gwblogabroad

Two weeks ago I went to my first GW basketball game. I had missed the first ten or more games because of papers, cold weather and… lack of motivation. But I finally decided I needed to go, mainly because my roommate told me it was probably the last game “our” team would win.

Of course I was late as usual so I missed the very beginning of the game. Yet, I did stay until the end so I was able to draw a few conclusions:

1)    You’d better not play at another university: After 5 minutes of games, the cheering and booing gave me a sense of the unbalanced situation: 95% of the people who came to see the game were for GW, the last 5% were for the other team. You could easily do the math: the other team was going to have a hard time. In the last minutes of the game, I was even for the other team because I felt sympathy for them. When the “enemies” tried to make a shot, everybody was yelling and making noise so that they would fail. When GW was making a shot, everybody was silent except for the 5%. And if they tried to make some noise, the 95% would start yelling at them.

2)    GW loves t-shirt: Not much to say about that except I had never seen so many people wearing yellow and blue t-shirts in the same room.

3)   George Washington is a little bit scary: Even though I have a problem with the name of the team being “colonials” considering… what it means, I’ve always thought the George Washington mascot was rather cool. Yet, at the game, he became a little bit scary, raising his fist and doing some foot tapping or something of the sort.

4)    It is hard for a feminist to watch cheerleaders: I tried to be opened to my friend’s arguments that there were some male cheerleaders but I am still skeptic. First, why do they change clothes three times a game? Second, it is hard to see men play and girls dance, no matter how you try not to perceive this as sexist.

5)    College sport makes people really aggressive: I was not surprised by the aggressiveness because people can get really passionate at soccer games in France too. Still, some people take the game really seriously. Maybe my perception is biased by the fact that I had a very angry supporter right behind me who kept kicking my seat and yelling insults at the other team. Yet, I think I will probably never understand the stakes in college basketball and to be honest I didn’t really care about who was going to win.

6)    At a basketball game, you have to deserve food: $4 a slice of pizza, seriously? This may be a strategy to fight against overweight but at 8:30 I started to be really hungry and a dilemma came to me: do I pay $1 for a bite of pizza or do I starve myself to death (that is to say until 9:30)?

7)    You can here “Billie Jean” played by a band (which doesn’t happen often): Some might say you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a Michael Jackson song played by saxophones, trumpets and other wind-related instruments. I don’t want to oversell it so I am just going to say that Michael Jackson himself would not have done better.

8)    I still don’t understand the part when guys danced with bayonets