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Nigel Sutcliffe

Politics, Philosophy & Economics at University of British Columbia 2003 - 2004

My year on exchange has certainly given me much to think about and has been a major influence on my life. It is difficult to think of something that it has directly changed about me but I guess that is simply because I have taken these experiences for granted.

The first thing that I realised from going on the exchange was actually just how simple it was to get to Canada. It would have been easy for me to have heard about the possibility of an exchange in lectures and just ignored it but that simple step of going to the exchange advisors office was one of the best I have ever made. In fact the university that I went to was not even on the list for philosophy but I asked about it anyway, and as luck would have it they had a space.

On exchange you really can discover so much, I took up snowboarding but I also discovered that I quite like sushi, and scuba diving. The courses were interesting and you will probably find that professors love you just for being an exchange student and will help you out as much as they can.

The people that I met were also amazing, some great friends were made along the way, some in fact were Lancaster students that I never would have met without the exchange, others were from slightly further away.

Exchange is not all good though of course, bits of it will certainly get you down. Like when you are asked for the 23rd time in the same day where you are from, "Lancaster? Is that near London?" or you begin to wonder why it is that they have to pronounce tomato, tomayto? But you will get used to this, and soon you will start saying it that way too until you get back home and your friends start laughing at you.

In our introductory talk from our Canadian University we were told that what we were about to experience was a ride on the wave of transition, sure we laughed at it too at the time but it holds true, there are troughs where things start to get to you, but the peaks will more than make up for them.

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