University: San Jose State University
City: San Jose
Country: United States
Continent: North America
Field of study: business administration
Study type: semester abroad
On the night of August 12, 2005, my journey to another country, to a strange city and a new challenge began. 21 hours later and a nine hour time difference, I got out of the cab and arrived at 2544 Edgedale Court, San Jose 95106 California and the house where I was to live for the next four and a half months. I was in the USA and an interesting semester began. I was able to quickly establish a good relationship with my landlord, who told me a lot and showed me a lot. Visit mcat-test-centers.com to get information about Thompson Rivers University.
A picturesque campus with palm trees and historical buildings on the one hand and state-of-the-art buildings such as the King’s Jr. Library or the Business Tower on the other provided a pleasant ambience at a great campus university. All my lectures took place in the Boracco Business Center. The Student Union with restaurants, conference rooms and opportunities to relax and learn in the middle of the campus is a central contact point for students. Generously designed sports facilities such as the Olympic swimming pool or the fitness club in the middle of the campus promote regular recreational sports. The new student residence right on campus “Campus Village” is very nice, although I preferred accommodation in a house 20 minutes from campus near the Eastridge Shopping Center in the southeast of the city.
We received an excellent welcome and were introduced to the language school “Studies in American Language (SAL)”, although some things were a little different than we all expected. In Ann Sarrafzadeh there is a very good contact person who will help you with putting together the timetable and other questions. Participation in the desired courses required some negotiating skills. In the USA, the number of participants is limited and you need a free seat. In the end, I was able to take part in four courses that I found very interesting and I would recommend, with the courses “Financial Management: Theory & Policy”, “Case Problems in Finance”, “Portfolio Management” and “Organizational Change & Design”. Good professors and small group work made for a very pleasant semester.
Sporting events had an immensely integrating component, such as football with the San Jose State Spartans and the battle cry “SJSU,” “SJSU,” “SJSU San Jose State,” basketball, or soccer.
Weekend trips with the CalTrain to San Francisco to the well-known sights such as the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, Fisherman’s Whraf, Pier 39 and the Cable Car were a very nice experience for me. The most beautiful beaches on the west coast or in the world can be found in Santa Cruz. A small town on the coast with seemingly endless sandy beaches, blue sea and the white spray of the waves. Here you will also find the jet set, who surf the blue waves of the Pacific.
Very nice sailing tours in San Francisco Bay were the highlights of my stay in the USA. Sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge with a magnificent view of the San Francisco skyline and the sun behind you provided the best opportunity to relax and unwind.
As the capital of Silicon Valley and the tenth largest city in the USA, San José stands for entrepreneurship and inventiveness like no other city and is home to companies such as JDS Uniphase, Google, Hewlett Packard, Agilent Technologies, McAffee, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo. Palo Alto, where IBM is headquartered, Mountain View, Sunnyvayle, Gillroy, Redwood City and Stanford are a short distance away via Highway 101. As I can confirm, the Bay Area is rightly considered one of the most beautiful parts of the world.
Very strong Mexican and Asian influence characterize the cityscape of San José. This is also reflected in the lectures.
University tours in Stanford with the Hoovertower, Berkeley with the Hass Business School or Columbia University in New York on the outskirts of Manhattan were very informative and offered further interesting insights into the American university landscape.
All in all, a semester that was very rich in experience and brought me contacts that will probably last a lifetime. In the end I would have liked to have stayed longer, but my Christmas vacation in New York at the end of my stay in the USA was still on the agenda.
