Things You Do On Exchange That Piss The Rest of Us Off
What your friends are too nice to tell you.
Exchange. Probably the best thing about university and arguably more interesting than the rest of your actual degree. According to the IRO website, NUS sends more than 1000 students out to universities across the globe each year. While not all of us might have had the good fortune (and the CAP) to have spent a semester abroad, there is no doubt that we’ve had the misfortune of having to bear with the irritating habits of our friends who have gone for exchange.
Most of us are nice enough not to say anything, but deep down, we’ve got a whole lot of thoughts bottled up. In fact, here at The Bullet, we’ve seen and heard so much that we’ve got enough material to write a damn article about it. To all those people, here’s a list of the things you do that piss us off.
Talk to us about exchange the whole semester before your actual exchange.
“Can’t wait to to be done with this sem so I can freeze my CAP on exchange.”
“Shit, I still have so much to do for my module mapping.”
“Eh, where should I visit first before my semester starts in late Feb?"
Yes, we get it. You get to travel, clear your tough af core mods and all you have to do is get a PASS grade. Just don’t rub it in our faces because while you’re off being a horrible exchange student to the locals there, we actually have to bear with incoming exchange students who fly off to “check Phuket out” the week before a project deadline. And no, no one cares about your module mapping.
Making the whole world send you off at the airport.
“We’re not that close. And neither is Changi Airport.”
Look. I’m gonna level with you. We’re not that close. In fact, it’s actually pretty weird that you want me to go send you off to... Where was it again? Utrecht? Oh, Uppsala, right. Where the hell is that anyway?
Statistics have proven that at least half the people in the picture will end up texting you only once during the entire semester and a third won’t even realise you’re back till a month after.
Flooding Instagram and Facebook.
Because if no one sees pictures of you spending the summer in Europe, did you actually spend said summer in said continent?
It’s Week 7 and I’ve got 4 upcoming midterms. What I need are coffee and memes. What I don’t need is you breaking the one-picture-a-day Instagram rule with a Boomerang of you waving in front of the Big Ben and an extra-reflective post about how historical London is.
And please, for the love of god, don’t dab next to the Eiffel Tower.
Icelandic glaciers: imagine seeing this picture on a sunny day at the CLB bus stop
And who could forget the dozens of skydiving videos we’ve been subjected to across Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat? It’s literally you screaming for 60 seconds while giving two thumbs up.
Your face is saying two thumbs down.
Coming up with your very own personalised #hashtag.
Ah, the hashtag. Gone are the days of having to compile pictures into an album. The only problem is that most decent-sounding hashtags already have thousands, if not millions, of posts to them. So what do you do? You create your own abomination of a hashtag to document your travels.
While some simply involve an amalgamation of their initials and the city (e.g. #KNNxSG), a large majority contain puns, jokes and wordplay involving names and cities/countries:
Some take a little more effort to decipher and can be mistaken as typos:
And some are half in english and the other in another language:
We’re not gonna lie - we did enjoy a couple that we came across. Kudos to those who came up with some, while ridiculous, pretty punny and entertaining hashtags!
Using said annoying #hashtag on throwbacks 2 semesters after coming back home
As if #tbt (throwback Thursday) wasn’t bad enough. Also, move on. I think we’ve seen enough pictures of you staring into the horizon while sitting on the edge of cliffs.
Having an accent when you come back
You were gone for less than 6 months. And you mainly hung out with other international students (we know, from your daily updates on Snapchat AND Instagram story). AND YOU WENT TO EUROPE. So tell me again how exactly is it that you seem to have acquired a slight American accent?
It’s alright if you try to push your tongue out a little to be understood easier over there. But stop saying you’ll get a bottle of “wa-der” in Cheers and please don’t tell the aunty at BreadTalk that you “would like a qwah-sownt.”
Frankly speaking, your accent’s not that good anyway.
Comparing everything
Your semester has ended and you’re back home in sunny Singapore. Almost too sunny. “In fact, was it this hot when I left?” you ask yourself. Yes, it was this hot. And this humid. From the time you left, the furthest we’ve gone to is Pulau Ubin. So please stop commenting on how hot the weather back here is; we know, we’re both sweating.
Besides the weather, we’re also sick of hearing how things were done back at your exchange university. We honestly couldn’t care less about how little you studied and how many more hours NUS has per week. And yes, six months is a pretty long time, but you’ve been living in Singapore 20 years. Surely that’s good enough reason not to keep going on about how you’re “not used to how expensive beer is here” upon your return.
You were an outgoing exchange student, not an incoming expat.
Jokes and rants aside, if you’ve been on exchange, you’d know just how fun the experience was. From practically dominating the bell curve overseas even without much studying (thanks, Singapore education system), to meeting up with friends in faraway cities and crashing in dorms, we’ve gotta admit that some moments were pretty unforgettable.
So who cares if you piss a few jealous people off back home?
Also, shout out to Exchangebuddy for doing an absolutely kick-ass job on sharing exchange stories and tips!
