Notes from New York: An Exchange Semester in Three Coffees

Coffee one: a hurried paper cup on my first morning at St. Francis College, Brooklyn. Everything was loud — the street, the pace, the classroom debates. In my seminars in Germany, discussion is considered and structured. In New York, it was a sport. I learned to think on my feet.

Coffee two: a long conversation with a classmate who worked nights and studied days. Cross-cultural communication stopped being a course topic and became a daily practice. I noticed how differently people relate to hierarchy, to time, to ambition — and how much of what we call 'personality' is actually culture wearing a familiar face.

Coffee three: the last week, journaling in a café in Brooklyn Heights, trying to write down what had changed. The answer was not academic. I had become more comfortable with uncertainty — with not having the right answer, only a better question.

An exchange semester is marketed as an adventure. It is actually an intervention: it disrupts your assumptions and leaves you to rebuild them. Mine came back stronger, and quieter, and far more curious.