Rei Suzuki is a current exchange student at UO from Waseda University in Japan.

As an exchange student, I have really enjoyed the Duck life at UO. Time passed very fast, I can’t imagine it has been almost 8 months since I came here to Eugene. Studying, chatting with friends, playing rugby, drinking and staying with my host family are all the elements making my study abroad program a memorable one. I want to introduce what my UO life is like: mainly about club sports!

September 15, 2015 was the day all exchange students from my home university came to UO. After 2 weeks of orientation for international students, my first term started. The first term was really challenging for me because adjusting to the environment here took much more time than I expected. The reason was that I belonged to the rugby club, so I have not only to study, but also spend time on practice after classes and almost every weekend for games. It was super hard in the first 2 months but, on the other hand, it gave me huge opportunities to make a lot of friends and to have great experiences going to California, Washington and Idaho for games to represent the UO. We went to all of the states stated above in vans, depending on where we were going, on average taking 6 or 7 hours.

On the way to the cities stated above, I used them to increase my slang vocabulary. Owing to the travel time, I was able to gain English skills in active conversation. In my opinion, school English is totally different from casual English. From that perspective, joining a club or any organization outside of your classes is really important. As a senior exchange student, I want to leave advice for future exchange students that you should join any club activity or community. It will make your program fruitful.

If you are interested in UO rugby club, here is the link. http://blogs.uoregon.edu/rugbymen/team-info/