Close your eyes and imagine you are in paradise: palm trees, the sound of the ocean a few feet away, soft sand, maybe you are lying in a hammock while a cool breeze grazes your face. It is warm and beautiful.
Despite how perfect this scene may sound right now, many students have chosen to leave Hawaii to attend Wesleyan University.
Wesleyan provides a change of scenery, an excellent education, and a completely new cultural experience for those who have spent their lives on one of the small tropical islands in the Pacific. Although Hawaii sounds like paradise to the rest of us, it is a very small paradise, which some feel can be suffocating at times.
The “rock” may be small, but the education options are even smaller in Hawaii.
“The school system in Hawaii doesn’t have many universities, so unless you want to go to the University of Hawaii, there is pretty much nowhere else you can go,” said Michael Gill ’10.
“I didn’t consider going to University of Hawaii,” said Reilly Park ’10. “It’s not strong academically. Not a lot of kids from my high school wanted to stay. A large portion do end up staying, but a lot of people try and go to school in other places. It wasn’t so much the East Coast, but Wesleyan. The film studies drew me here.”
Coming to the East Coast can provide a different perspective on life.
“I’ve heard some people mystifying Hawaii as being a completely different part of the world,” Gill said. “In coming to Connecticut, I was trying to put myself in a completely different culture, a point of intrigue.”
The opportunity to experience a new culture was one of the reasons that Laura Berssenbrugge ’10 decided to come to the University.
“As strange as it sounds, a year ago, when I was deciding where to attend college, the East Coast seemed very glamorous,” Berssenbrugge said. “For all that Middletown may not be the most glamorous of places, New York City definitely lived up to my expectations. I really wanted to experience more of the world during college.”
Still, there are many aspects of island life that students miss.
Although Berssenbrugge had worried about the weather before coming to school, she found that the adjustment was less difficult than she had expected.
“I loved going sledding down Foss Hill,” she said. “It was my first time sledding since I was seven!”
Beyond adjustments to the weather, students miss food from home. Oftentimes, Hawaiian students find themselves requesting care packages of foods that are completely foreign to students from the East Coast.
“The food is really different here,” Park said. “When I came back from Christmas break, I brought 18 cans of juice [from] Hawaiian passion orange to guava juice, chocolate macadamia nuts, and a lot of Asian snacks.”
Other favorites of Hawaiian students include Yaki Mochi (Japanese rice cakes), Li Hing Mui (dried plum candy covered in sugary powder), and dried mango. Something that may surprise “mainlanders” is the popularity of Spam.
“In Hawaii everyone loves Spam,” Gill said. “But everyone hates it here. They think it’s gross.”
Even though Hawaiians do miss their Spam, the beach, and the warm weather, the students here have a newfound appreciation for aspects of East Coast living.
“Hawaii really doesn’t have seasons, and so it’s wonderful to watch the flowers and trees begin to sprout leaves again,” Berssenbrugge said.
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