The walls of Weaver Hall are bare before the students move in. Cold and white concrete canvases. It’s up to them to make those lifeless spaces sing; some, like international exchange student Aidan Knowles, can transform a sullen spot into a life-sized scrapbook.
Knowles is one of about 200 international exchange students who study at UF every year, according to the UF International Center. He is a junior from Ireland, and he’s spending his spring semester at UF. Despite the different environment, adjusting has been surprisingly easy for the Dublin native.
“Everything is just so impressive,” he said. “I’m just ... I’m just really proud to be here.”
Knowles has gotten so used to campus life at a public university that he doesn’t even want to think about leaving. When May rolls around, Knowles will head home to a city where clouds hover over tiny streets, and concepts he loves, like collegiate pride and spirit, don’t exist.
“I saw a woman the other day wearing a shirt that said ‘Gator nurse since 1973,’ and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it,” he said. “We don’t even make shirts with our school’s name on them because nobody would buy them. No one cares where they graduate from.”
Knowles is in his early 20s and looks more Spanish than Irish. He has silky black hair that swoops over his forehead, black scruff and brown eyes that glaze when he has too many beers. The only Irish thing about his appearance, he said, is his pale skin, but that will change now that the weather is warming up.
“It’s always f***ing raining there,” he said. “It makes you want to stay inside. Everyone is so active here because of the nice weather.”
As a journalism student at the Dublin Institute of Technology, a well-known college in Ireland that 20,000 students attend, Knowles had the opportunity to study journalism at UF or the University of Missouri through an exchange program. He chose UF because of the warm weather.
He said one of the main differences he’s noticed between here and his home is that grade point averages are a myth at his school in Dublin. All students have to do is pass their classes during senior year and they get their degree.
His school is in downtown Dublin, but Knowles lives a 30-minute bus ride outside of the city in a suburb with his mom, dad and 14-year-old sister. Weaver Hall, UF’s international residence hall and his home here in Gator country, is only a 5-minute walk from his classes.
Unlike UF, in Dublin, the college’s campus is spread out around the city. School buildings are plopped among the pubs and the bookie agencies that line the narrow streets.
But, he said, despite Dublin’s propensity for long-distance travel, there’s a road in Gainesville that rivals the biggest highway in Ireland.
He said crossing Archer Road is like crossing Ireland’s busiest “motorway.”
“Everytime I cross it, I’m always like ‘I’m gonna die. Oh my God, Oh my God, I’m gonna die,’” he said.
The fact that UF has an actual, walkable campus in one area of a city is mesmerizing to him.
The compact campus is what adds to the strong sense of school pride, he said, because students are constantly reminded that they are all Gators.
Even the idea of dining halls where students can gather to eat was foreign to him until he came here. At home, he said, students disperse throughout the city and eat at cafes, rarely realizing that the person next to them may also go to the same school.
Every day, he looks forward to eating omelettes and drinking smoothies while dissecting the previous night’s antics and sharing stories with friends at Gator Corner Dining Center. Knowles and his Weaver Hall friends spend hours getting to know one another while half-eaten plates around them turn into 6-inch stacks.
“We are all in the same boat coming here,” he said. “None of us know anyone, so we just all got along right off the bat.”
JR Miller, his resident hall adviser, said there is a rumor going around Weaver Hall that Knowles is most likely to be crowned prom king at the international students’ prom in April. At the end of every semester, the international students’ residence hall holds a dance for all of the tenants. They call it prom.
“He’s always wants to go places and try things,” Miller said. “I think that’s why he settled in so easily. He just wants to be around everybody.”
Knowles and his friends visit the UF Bookstore at least every week to add to their growing Gator clothing collection. He said he admires school spirit so much that last week he spent $100 on Gators T-shirts, including a women’s water polo shirt that he got for a tournament.
Sporting events keep school spirit alive, Knowles said, adding that the absence of collegiate athletics in Dublin is probably the reason for students’ apathy toward their colleges. The Dublin Institute of Technology has no school-wide sporting events. His school doesn’t have a stadium, let alone a stadium that seats 90,000 people. He laughed when he thought about Ben Hill Griffin Stadium sitting in the middle of a city whose tallest building is four stories and whose streets are about as wide as the end zone.
“You guys are so lucky,” he said. “I wish I was here for football season, but we get a taste of what it must be like when we’re at basketball games. I’m coming back for one, though. I’ll be back.”
Most international students at UF leave with the hope of coming back, said Lyn Straka, director of UF’s International Exchange Visitor Services. Those who have a hard time transitioning to life here find the language barrier or the educational system difficult.
“Students who understand that this is an experience and don’t just allow it to happen to them are the ones that get the most out of being here,” Straka said. “ You have to be a part of the environment and the experiences.”
Knowles knows that come May he’ll have to tear everything down from his walls, so for now, he plans to continue to cover them in memories.
“By the time I leave, there won’t be any white showing,” he said. “I’m not just going to sit around and let this time pass.”
