Hey there! I’m Sam Wilkins and I am a second year International Relations student. I’m originally from the small village of Southmoor near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. I may have shared a couple of classes with some of you reading this.
When I applied to Richmond, I was very interested in the study abroad options offered by Richmond, the second I could apply to study abroad I signed up. I have always wanted to go to America and this seemed the perfect opportunity. When I looked through the options I wanted a real all American experience, and I have always been drawn to the south, so logically my first choice was the University of South Carolina.
After I had all my paperwork in order and visa secured I got on a flight to Charleston, South Carolina from London and arrived in Columbia, state capitol and home of USC soon after. USC is on a nice and large campus, with lots of green space and there is always something going on. The thing I love about Columbia the most is despite being a city, it’s smaller than London by a tonne, so it feels a very homely.
Culture shock was surprisingly little, as South Carolina reminds me a fair bit of my village and surrounding area, however I was pretty shocked to see that Walmart was bigger than the row of houses I live on back home. The people here are super friendly too, they love to hear from someone from across the Atlantic.
The beginning of fall was a fun time, met my friends at an event held by the university for new students. My friends I met are Brandon, Ryder, Jalynn and Aiden, all born and raised a couple hours away in a town called Gaffney. They effectively adopted me into their group, and I would go to watch the USC football team, the Gamecocks (or more commonly known as the cocks). College football is the second religion of the south, with the whole of Columbia shutting down for game days. People bring their pickup trucks to the stadium and grill, drink beers and play games before the game starts, this is called tailgating. The cocks had a couple of wins this season, but it did often feel like being an England football fan, with some tough losses!
Over fall break, I went upstate to Gaffney, where I spent time with Brandon and his family. Gaffney is amazing, it reminds me a lot of back home, a proper small town with small town values. We would go out in Brandon’s Mustang, go fishing for Bass and Bluegill, go to haunted farms for Halloween and eat good southern food. Favourite southern food has to be fried catfish, grits and crawfish.
While studying abroad you can take great classes to fulfil your electives as well as your core classes. My favourite class was with the US Marine Corps ROTC unit, where I learnt warfighting in the “Fundamentals of manoeuvre warfare” class. Instead of a standard paper for a midterm I had to present to a class of Marines officer trainees how I would recover a downed airman while co-ordinating artillery fire, machine gun support and helicopters, a challenging yet rewarding task to say the least.
I really recommend reaching out to the study abroad team at Richmond, Maggie is excellent and very well versed, she will guide you through the process and can help you go on arguably one of the best experiences of being a student. My and others big concern about going abroad is having the money to study abroad, however for me it came out considerably cheaper to do a year in SC than my usual year in London!
Take care all, I’ll let you know how thanksgiving went when I next write, I’ll say now it only gets more southern from here on in!
Speak to you soon,
