The ISA JournalLiving and Learning in London

Hello, once again, I am doing great! I love it here!!

The food here is good- a traditional plate here is fish and chips. They sell them everywhere and it’s a “must have” here in London. The food is relatively cheap compared to the U.S.; I bought this plate for only 6 BPS (~$9 USD) while on an ISA excursion to Stratford upon Avon and Warwick Castle. Let me just say that the fish was really tasty; by the time I got up from my chair that plate was empty!

Aside from that I have meet some wonderful people here from the United Kingdom and other European countries, as well as students from all over the U.S. Everyone is very friendly! I have already teamed up with some of them to do some traveling around Europe on the weekends! :D

This photograph was taken outside of Shakespeare’s house. We went inside the house of the best writer that the world has known and got to experience firsthand how he lived as well as many factors in his life that inspire him to write some of the most famous plays he wrote such as The Twelfth Night.

ISA Students at Shakespeare's House — ISA students and I outside of Shakespeare's House. It's amazing to see where such an amazing writer lived!

In respect to academics, the classes are not hard but the assignments are different here than the U.S. since they use the Harvard citation system. The classes are taught by British professors with the particular British accent. I haven’t had any tests and I don’t think I’ll be having any because here your grade is divided in two major assignments: mostly a 10 page research paper along with some other project, but you have the whole semester to work on them. Even so, I have to say that in order to get a good grade I have to read and study on my own apart from attending to all my classes. It has been a little bit challenging for me because I am more used to depending on professors and specific books with specific chapters for my learning. In contrast, here the learning process happens mostly independently which means that you have to read several books and take notes of the information to be able to reference it later on. The good thing is that since Roehampton University is so used to having international students studying at their campus, they offer plenty of opportunities for academic support and the professors are open for discussion for any question I may have.