I keep looking back and wondering whether it was courage or stupidity of a 16 year old to think that I would figure things out when I got to America. I never really stopped to think how I would figure them out. Just that I would (which, I suppose, I’d have to – what other choice was there?). And so I got off the plane in Boston with $200 in my pocket and headed to college.
One major thing that I had not counted on was the exorbitant price of textbooks in this country. Nor the fact that publishers changed the editions and the content (like the numbers of the homework problems) every couple of years to discourage the resale of textbooks. What?
Back home, even the fact that the language of instruction had recently changed hadn’t stopped us from using 20 year old textbooks: physics was physics regardless of the language, right? There were also other ways of saving money on textbooks. One method included making a list of all the neighbours who were one grade ahead of me, and hitting them up before the school year started to make sure they hadn’t yet given their books away. Another method centered around splitting up school subjects between 4-5 classmates: each of us would buy the books for 1-2 subjects, and we would rotate who got to keep which books when. This required doing the homework ahead some of the time, but worked very effectively. Method number three came with having enough money to be able to afford photocopying the entirety or at least portions of somebody else’s book. This would sometimes devolve into photocopying photocopies (and so on, and so forth) until the material would be rendered illegible, and then you’d have to track down a person with an actual book after all.
Continue reading “Pack… Your Textbooks”
Packing List for Immigration 