As any other foreign culture, the American one differs from the environment I am used to at home. First of all, I’d like to mention I’d never shared my space before, even though I understand it is my personal problem. At the dormitory we live in, this problem is easily solved by giving students a choice whether to rent single or double room. Of course, the price for a single room is higher, but in this question your comfort is at stake.
Among the other problems I faced was location of our dorm outside the campus, which made everyday way to school very complicated. With changing two buses, the road took me up to an hour and a half each way. When I tried to manage this by renting a car, I faced another issue. It appeared that my student visa didn’t give me the right to get car insurance, which is obligatory to buy when you rent a car. Obviously, I couldn’t change my visa status, so my solution of the problem was to buy a bicycle. In that way I combined traveling to school and working out.
The biggest complicacy was that my visa status didn’t let me obtain a tax payer ID that made it impossible for me to do things that, to my mind, are part of everyone’s daily life. For example, I could not open a bank account, get a local ID, except for the student’s one, which was invalid outside the campus anyway. Generally speaking, I could not discover local life outside the study hall. That is a major disadvantage of the student exchange program I became a member of.
If I had to make any recommendations on what should be changed to help students, I’d definitely stress on the aforementioned problems being solved first and foremost.