105 Learning Journal #5

[Noelle Garcia]

My own experiences of culture shock on this campus happened during my freshman year when I was expecting to enter a very vibrant, diverse environment but was disappointed when I realized that the school is dominated by many privileged, white students hailing from the North. I think I had this idea of college that resembled a lot more like VCU's community but that was absolutely not the case with the University of Richmond. I think my experience of culture shock was stronger when I first moved to the suburbs of Northern Virginia from the city of Manila. Everything up there (and here)   is so much cleaner and more orderly. Neighbors seemed friendly but didn't have the same feeling as community as in the Philippines. Ultimately the notion of individualism is clearly reflected in the United States, because in a way, I think people here are generally more self-interested, even though generally everyone is. It's just a lot more emphasized here. Another culture shock experience I had was when I went to Dublin to study abroad. I had this idea that people were going to be a lot more different than they are here, and to my surprise Ireland and the US are pretty similar. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the individualistic mind-set of most of the Western world. I think it's hard for me to relate to people from here and other Western places because I grew up with a collectivist mind-set, and have a bit of an open, warm personality that might seem intrusive to people who aren't used to blunt honesty.