The Gringa Student

This is the first in a four-part series about actually being a student in Chile.

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I walked into the large classroom, passing the two or three other students that were already there, studying quietly at their desks before taking my seat. I usually made it to class before the other seventy-something Chilean students, unable to break my habit of getting to class a few minutes early—unable to break this habit even after weeks of attending classes that only occasionally started on time. By this point in the semester, I was the last of seven or eight foreign students at the University of Valparaíso who had originally enrolled in this class.

The university has a number of buildings located in both Valparaíso and the neighboring city, Viña del Mar. The university has around 13,500 students with the vast majority being undergraduates, and it has over 50 academic programs. Though numerically smaller than my university, which has around 20,000 students, it is geographically much bigger with the different schools spread out over the two cities. I’ve heard it referred to as the second-best university in the country, after the university located in Santiago, the capital of Chile.

           

Back in the classroom, I dropped into my usual chair in front of the teacher’s desk, opening my backpack to pull out the study sheets I had made. Stooping over them, I tried not to panic as I considered my first test in the hardest history class I had ever taken. I had spent the past three nights studying the numerous texts that the test would cover. Two of them had been particularly difficult to read—about 500 pages written in Old Spanish (like Old English just in Spanish) as if modern Spanish wasn’t difficult enough. I stared at my outlines, my eyes crossing slightly, until the professor and the majority of the class walked in about fifteen minutes later. After the students had settled down, the professor borrowed a sheet of paper from one of them, held it up and folded it in half.

           

“You will write your first answer here,” he said, pointing at the top half of the page, “and the second answer here,” pointing at the bottom half of the page, before he handed the sheet back to its owner. The professor then gave another sheet of paper to his assistant and sat down at his desk while the assistant hurriedly scrawled out the two test questions on the blackboard at the front of the room. I looked from my blank piece of paper to the two questions written on the blackboard and back to my blank sheet of paper—my mind completely blank. I had studied for hours; this test was going to count for forty percent of my grade, and I had no idea what the answers were.

           

“Shit…” I thought and laid my head on the desk.

Continue to Part Two.