Outgoing Exchange Students

My SEP Experience

Lum Wei Soon
School of Computing
SEP to UC Davis, USA

Hola! Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in the United States and the fourth most widely used language in the world. At UC-Davis, I had the opportunity to pick up some Spanish when I took Spanish 1 during my Spring Quarter.  What I liked most about studying in UC-Davis compared to NUS was the wide variety of classes that I could take.  It was perhaps a blessing in disguise that UC-Davis did not have a department in Information Systems, my major, for undergraduates.  So when I found out that there weren't many classes that I could take to map back to NUS, I set my heart upon choosing fun classes. And, I must admit that I've never enjoyed school as much as during my Spring Quarter in Davis. 

Did you know that champagne comes from red grapes? I was surprised to learn this in my Introduction to Winemaking class.  UC-Davis is the first university in the United States to have a Viticulture and Enology department. Viticulture is the field of Grape-growing while Enology is the study of winemaking.  California makes 90% of the wine in the US and Davis is only an hour away from Napa Valley, the premier wine region of California.  There is even a vineyard and a winery right on the UC-Davis campus.

Want to know about the Greek Pantheon of Gods and how they are related to the Roman Pantheon? Did you know that Iraq, known as Mesopotamia then, lies on the site of the Ancient Sumerian civilization?  How about the fact that 2000 years before Noah, cuneiform tablets found on archaeological sites in Iraq documented how Ea directed Utnaphistum to tear down his house and build a ship, to take with him the seed of all living things in preparation of the impending Great Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh? All this and more I learned in my class on Greek, Roman and Near Eastern Mythology.  Never before have I been so excited about going to class. Every lecture I would sit and listen to the myths and stories told by Professor Strasser such as how Odysseus took ten years after the end of the Trojan War to make his way back home in The Odyssey or how Aeneus set the foundation for the Roman Empire in Virgil's Aenied.  All this made me very interested in the Mediterranean region, and I am even planning to backpack in Greece next year to witness some of the discussed in class.