Published on 2024-01-24 22:28 by Sam Wu

Shea Mowry

I moved around a lot. I lived in America until I was 10, and then I moved to Sweden and then the UK. I went to an international school outside London. I applied to BU because there are a lot of kids who are American but have lived abroad. BU has a lot of international students and it’s super nice in terms of culture acclimation. There’s an understanding that everyone’s coming from different cultures. There’s also a weirdness to it. I am American, but I don’t get what’s going on here. It’s supposed to be my culture but then I have culture shock. That’s a weird thing. Luckily, BU has a lot of those kids. I’ve met many who are also American but also don’t really know what’s up. That’s more comforting for me than an international student who doesn’t understand a cultural reference or something because I just relate to it more.

A weird thing about BU is when I first got here, I wanted to add a billion majors and minors. I started to ask myself why. Why do you need so many labels? But when you get into it, it feels like I could get this and this, and you’re trying to get the most out of your time. It does make sense. But when I first came in, I felt that people were trying to do a lot.

But since I’ve moved around a bit, I feel like college is a nice reset. After high school people think they understand who you are, and if you act out of that, they’re like, what’s happening? When you show up in a new place, you can just act however and no one expects anything different from you. When I came to college I decided I was gonna be bold and go for it. I was always extroverted, but that wasn’t necessarily what I used to do. In college, There are so many new faces that you can totally rebrand, you know what I mean? So a big part of my growth was rebranding. I can be however bold or confident or academic, and there’s no question that that’s not where I’m at.

Written by Sam Wu