What's it like at UGA?

Lala7819
Fri, 14 May 2010 22:05:43 +0000

(months too late on this post, but hey I’m pre-pharm, no time for much other than chem,bio, and calc during the year, it seems)

Hopefully someday this could help some of my fellow northerners. I came down here from the yankee-est of yankee places. Northern Vermont (aka Almost Canada, 20 mins from boarder and Montreal is the closest city). I came down here from a state with 99.9% white people (though that includes Eastern Europeans, and I may be exaggerating a bit) and most of our non-white population is refugees so it’s a bit different. I grew up going to Boston and was used to the idea that where there are multiple races, they all han out all happy happy.

UGA weirded me out a bit at first because of the same thing other students said, the self imposed peer-groups. People of different races just don’t mix too often (and I tended to spend a fair bit of time on campus people-watching because this interested me at first). I have had a hard time making deep connections with fellow UGA students because of the divide, and it seems whenever friend groups are already made, members of them are hard to meet new people/make friends outside the group (Doesn’t seem to be an issue coming in as a freshman, but I was a transfer student).

Onto the yankee issue… people know I am not from GA from my lack of any sort of southern accent, and as I’ve heard before "I know you’re a yankee cause you enunciate too well’. Bah, jokes, they have them down here. Very few people are ‘against’ the northerners in Athens, it seems to be just a fact of life that northerners live here for college. I’ll get yankee comments upon people seeing my car (therefore realizing I am, in fact, a yankee), or jokingly from friends.

On campus, it seems finding out you arent from GA is a temporary point of interest for other students with many questions like ‘where is that?’ ‘what’s it like up there?’ and ‘how is it different/how do you like it down here?’ No big deal, and after that it’s done and behind them and you are one of the masses.

Anyway, 5 months too late, TL;DR and all, I hope you all made out alright in your school choices.