Au Revoir Gainesville

Almost four years ago on January 1st 2016, I was poking around the UF International Center trying to find my way to check-in with them. And two years later on 16th December 2017, I got my graduate degree from the University of Florida with a Master’s in Science. It’s been two years since I moved out of Gainesville but I still reminiscence about my time there. I wanted to share my experiences and bid farewell to an amazing part of my life. As they say, better late than never!

My experiences of moving to USA can be found here and here, where I came as an exchange student for a semester initially and returned to pursue my Masters. From an academic perspective, I did not have any issues with adjusting to the classes and the structure of the courses. Masters was a breeze for me. All the credit for that goes to my undergrad college, IIIT-Delhi. Some of the courses were very similar to the courses I had taken in IIIT-Delhi. I learnt concepts like plagiarism and the tools to detect them, like Moss (Measure of Software Similarity) script in my first year of Bachelors. I also had a much more rigorous course load in Bachelors so adapting to the course load at UF was easy. There were a few courses though which were very interesting and new for me, like Computers and Network Security, Introduction to Cryptography and Programming Language Principles. The professors were more approachable and friendly, in my opinion, but it also might be biased as I never interacted much with my course professors during Bachelors. There was much more to Gainesville than only the academic experience.

Pursuing a Masters also meant that I needed to find an internship and subsequently, a job, to be able to stay in the country. That experience in itself was a direct contrast to Bachelors in IIITD, where companies would come to our campus to offer internships and jobs and all one needed to do was have a GPA above a certain threshold to be able to take their initial assessment, which was usually a coding round. For universities in the US, the companies do come to the campus at an event called career fair. Students need to talk to the recruiters and engineers from the companies they are interested in and give their resume and hope to expect a callback. There is no standard coding assessment sent to everyone, but a select few. That isn’t a problem but rather the fact that a handful of these companies sponsor visas and majority of the students want to talk to these companies, which leads to an insane line with more than a hundred people (there were 450 students in my batch at UF) standing in a line to talk to the recruiters, who end the conversation by telling you to apply online. The whole process is very frustrating as you continue to stand in line for 4 hours and get a chance to talk to two or three companies if you are lucky. Besides the companies at the career fair, I had to apply to two hundred, maybe more, companies online. This was to increase the chances of getting some calls. My seniors told me that if you received back even 5 calls, it was worth it. It is such a tiresome process as all the companies have their own portals and you have to fill out the same information over and over. It felt like such a waste of time but there was no way around it. The online applications didn’t yield much results for me, but referrals definitely did. Referrals, I feel, carry a little more weight than online applications and ensure that someone, at least, looks at your application. I have been told that it gets easier once you have a job, to switch over and it isn’t as time-consuming as this process, but you have to do it once to get there.

The experience of moving to another country and living on my own made me appreciate everything that I took for granted. The first two weeks were spent settling in, eating ready-to-eat food and coming to the slow realization that I need to manage everything on my own. The weeks started rolling by and life fell into a pattern – school on the weekdays, laundry, cleaning, taking out the trash, grocery shopping and cooking on the weekends. Assignments and dishwashing were an everyday activity. I went from a person who didn’t know how to cook anything except Maggi to someone who knew how to make four edible vegetables in four months. I learnt more cooking in the following months and year. Moving out three times in two years made me realize about the number of things I own. The ironic part was, the majority of my things were back in India and this was a very small subset of my belongings.

I made some friends from different backgrounds and nationalities. I celebrated festivals like Easter, Halloween and Thanksgiving, which was a first for me. I experienced things which I had only seen in movies until that point – making s’mores in a bonfire, having chilli with sourdough bread, making spiked Jell-O, crazy house parties, even crazier club parties and white sand beaches. I got to take a walk down French Quarter in New Orleans, break my stilettoes in a club in Miami, see the sunset at Siesta Key beach, visit the World of Coke in Atlanta, drink butterbeer in Universal Studios, swim through springs in state parks in Florida, run to North Carolina from a hurricane and enjoy a summer in Seattle with family.

Being a student at the University of Florida, hands down has been one of the most exciting, terrifying, unexpected and rare experiences of my life, something I won’t get to do again in life. I’m thankful to everyone who made it possible and was a part of my journey.