For Annalise Romoser, studying Spanish and international studies and trudging to class in the rain didn’t seem like the right fit. For Romoser and many students like her, the National Student Exchange program is a chance for a change of scenery and a chance to hone the skills the University instilled.
NSE encourages students to spend between a term and a year at one of 169 campuses in the U.S., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands
— at the cost of in-state tuition.
The University has been involved with NSE for almost the entire 32-year existence of the exchange, University coordinator Karen Cooper said.
“You can experience the environment in another area and get a whole different cultural experience,” Cooper said. “You’re paying your in-state tuition so if you want to try something new, you can.”
Cooper said about 35 NSE students leave the University for a year, and between 40 and 50 students come to the University from other schools.
University students’ most popular schools include the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and colleges in Hawaii, Cooper said. The University is most frequently visited by students from those schools as well.
“It’s a sort of trade,” Cooper said.
Being a part of the NSE is not the same as transferring, Cooper said. She added that most students, regardless of their home school, come back instead of staying at the new campus.
“In many cases NSE increases students staying here. For some students who wished they went out of state (for college), they … fulfill that need to travel and go to school somewhere else. They get that out of their system and come back to us,” Cooper said.
Romoser spent a semester at the University of Puerto Rico in Cayey and experienced firsthand what she studied in her University double major.
“I took what I learned as a Spanish major and applied it,” Romoser said. “I also really saw what I learned in international studies … the consequences of international development on the Puerto Rican people, their country and their environment.”
She said her biggest difficulty with the whole experience had nothing to do with the program itself; it was the “lack of public planning” in Puerto Rico. She said she lived 15 miles from the beach but couldn’t get there because of insufficient public transit.
Senior journalism major Jody Campbell is attending the University from Humboldt State University in California. She decided to join the NSE so she could continue school after moving to Oregon with her husband.
Campbell said she liked the University community and has enjoyed meeting a lot of new people. She said she was impressed by the resources of the University’s School of Journalism and Communication.
“It’s a good program,” Campbell said. “They’ve got a lot of new technology.”
Experiences differ with each participant, Cooper said. Skye Drnek, a sophomore pre-physical therapy major from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, said her biggest complaint was meteorological.
“I liked the rain at first, but by the end of the term I was really sick of it,” Drnek said. “Other than that, I didn’t have too many dislikes. I liked the whole thing.”
Drnek came to the University to take some of her school’s general education requirements, not because of any certain programs or classes that interested her. For her, it was just for the experience of a new environment.
“It was basically the opportunity to experience how different schools can be,” she said. “I met so many people and had so many opportunities to do things I wouldn’t have been able to do (in California). I would definitely recommend it,” she said.
E-mail reporter Marcus Hathcock
at [email protected].