Chad Hyde is spending his year abroad at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
As I hopped off the plane at LAX and drew a deep breath of the warm Californian air I realised I was living my dream. For years I had longed that one day I would go to school in L.A. and just as my schooling career was potentially nearing its end this had all but become a fantasy. But yet here I am!At Kent I live at home and so this experience was daunting to say the least, but in the short time I have been here I have made so many new friends. Socially, there is always something to do; in the first week alone I went to a free concert, been a part of a stampede into a shop for a sale, slow-mo-Baywatch ran on Santa Monica beach, went to a frat party and walked miles. Living on “frat row” I am in party central and am steadily making more American friends – the English accent is better than any bribe and gets you places! And Eliot footpath and Tyler Hill on Kent’s campus are like small inclines in comparison to the hills of the UCLA campus – but once you reached the top of campus (on Sunset Boulevard no less) the view of Los Angeles makes it worth it.
Classes are very different from Kent; first you have to choose from the hundreds of courses on offer to build your own timetable and then the classes themselves are intense – a real brain workout! And there is homework and weekly discussion groups for each class – contrasting with the more independent learning style I have become used to at Kent.
All in all this has so far been one of the best experiences of my life, and the forecast – much like the weather – looks amazing!