Does College Define You?

April 7, 2017

When I started college at the age of 18 years old, I felt simultaneously like an adult living on my own for the first time and like a camper waiting for my parents to come pick me up at any moment. Georgetown quickly became my entire world, as I joined two dance groups, SAPE, and other organizations, determined to get as much as I could out of Georgetown, beyond the classroom experience.


When we started here at the University of Florence back in February, a few of us inquired into how we could join a sports team or a theater group to get more involved with Italian social life. Last semester in Dublin, I joined the trampoline team and made better friends than I could have imagined. They helped me learn how to navigate my way through slang, from "craic" to more complicated vernacular, and the best way to get to the exam hall (and the fact there is an exam hall). Most importantly, though, I left the door to Ireland open with friends ready to welcome me back with open arms. Coming to Italy with this in mind, I knew the quickest way to meet local students would be through clubs, but Italian universities don't work that way.

For Italian students, university isn't the source of all social activity like it is back home. Universities are solely for class; just as quickly as they flood into their seats at the beginning of class, which are often saved by one friend for a group of 20 of them, they disperse back into the city. While you can often see students catching a quick smoke break outside a classroom building, the lack of a central campus means after class is over, students return back to the city, not as university students, but simply as Florentines.

In Washington, D.C., my identity revolves around being a Georgetown student. I am in the city for a specific reason and, while students venture out for the odd day or two, their lives still depend on the campus and the university. Conversely, Italian students go to university to get their degree, but socially live their lives outside of the context of school. Because of this absence of a need for the university to provide them more than just classes, Italian students feel more like real people instead of bubbled-in college students. While almost all Italian students live at home with their parents, they have an apparent independence and maturity that their American counterparts lack. While my 18-year-old self felt mature moving away from home for the first time, I moved into a community that fully took care of me instead of navigating it on my own. Everything at the University of Florence is self-guided, down to the work level, where the students dictate how much reading and work they do over the course of the semester to be adequately prepared for the final exam.

The other day at dinner, my host dad turned to me and asked if I had made an effort to talk to some of the Italian kids in my classes. I blushed sheepishly and admitted that I had half-heartedly tried a few times, but that often I was too intimidated by the big groups they sat in. He shrugged and waved it off, saying that was simply a Florentine thing. Florence is a very small city, and for the people who have lived here their entire lives, there is a comfort in maintaining the routines and relationships they have had since they were children. In the United States, students come from all over to go to university in a new city, usually alone. We need sports teams and clubs to find common ground and spark friendships, but in Italy the desire to get involved just does not exist. While American students pass their four years at university never wanting it to end, Italian students enter college with their identities already formed, looking towards the future with college as merely a stepping stone to what lies next.
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