The Gringa Student, Part 4

The is the final post of the four-part series. If you missed the previous ones, you can find them here:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

 

The United States’ university system, in contrast, is different. Normally, if you want to meet with a professor, you can drop by his or her office during office hours or send an email to request a meeting time. On a number of occasions, I’ve just gone and knocked on the office door, but that’s an advantage of attending a medium-sized school. Most professors want you to do well, if possible, and many will try to meet with struggling students. This doesn’t mean that hard teachers don’t exist in the United States or that some teachers could care less whether or not their students do well. However, in my experience, professors in the United States are more accessible and generally more helpful than the ones in Chile.

Does this mean that people in the United States get A’s when they don’t necessarily deserve them? Would we be better served by remembering that a C means acceptable, a B above average, and an A excellent? Does the Chilean system set you up to only achieve the minimum? I don’t really know the answers to any of these questions. I think a four is more acceptable in Chile because it is understood that the classes are more difficult, but that might have just been the fact that I was studying at one of the most difficult universities in the country.

The classes reserved for foreign students were more like classes that I have had here in the States. I don’t know whether these classes were geared more toward the U.S. style of teaching or if they were simply easier. The class that mixed foreign and native students was more difficult than the gringo only classes, but it wasn’t as difficult as my two direct-exchange classes. All of the professors taught in Spanish so the varying difficulty level wasn’t due to language.

One would think that teaching wouldn’t differ that much from country to country, but now I know firsthand just how different teaching styles can be. Studying abroad was more than worth it, and I’d recommend that everyone should do it. Even if the transition is difficult, you get to learn about the way things are done in a different country, and I got to learn more about Latin American history. I got to learn details that we didn’t cover in the United States and got to learn about Chilean history from a Chilean perspective. However, I am glad to be finishing my last year of college and writing my theses in the United States where at least I know what is expected of me. 

November 2, 2009