Hello everyone. So my name is Felicia Miguel and I am originally from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. But for this semester I am studying at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras in San Juan.
So I'm so excited this semester to be one of the vloggers for NSE and talk to you all about my experiences here studying at the University of Puerto Rico. So currently as I'm filming this video classes haven't actually started. If you've been keeping up with the news, unfortunately Puerto Rico's was hit with a lot of earthquakes. And at first I thought that was going to keep me from coming on time, but actually no, everything's still good here where I'm studying at in San Juan. It's just that on the southern part of the Island where there's a lot of power outages due to the earthquakes, but there still are a couple of things wrong here in the capital. So classes were supposed to begin January 13th but unfortunately they got moved back to starting on January 21st. So by the time that they've made this decision, all of the students with NSE program, we all already arrived. So we've been here, but we have about 9, 10 days with no class, which at first was really scary for all of us, but we all made a big group chat. And now we've been able to hang out and it's really like a big, a big mini vacation actually. So since I've been here in Rio Piedras and in San Juan, I've had the opportunity to see so much of the place. I flew in to San Juan and then Rio Piedras is like still in the capital, but it's kind of a different part itself. So I'm currently staying at the dorms.
So for today I will actually not be doing a review whatsoever. I've had a lot of great and different things happen in my life recently. So I wanted to talk about those since I really didn't get to post last semester since I was very busy and I kind of have a feeling the same thing's going to happen this semester. So currently I am studying, at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras here in San Juan, which is so amazing. Even though I have a book review, a lot of you probably don't know, I'm actually a Math major and a Spanish major, which has nothing to do with books. The math program here is really good. Obviously Puerto Rico, you have so many great resources to learn and immerse myself in Spanish. In fact, my classes are all going to be in Spanish, so I'm going to be taking a literature class in Spanish, linear algebra, differential equations, lots of other things.
If you follow me personally on Instagram, you probably know I don't really talk a lot about my personal life. But I feel that coming here to Puerto Rico is such a wonderful experience. And I wanted to document this not only for myself but for anyone else who's really interested in studying abroad, but you want a more affordable or domestic way because Puerto Rico still has all the beautiful Latin culture, but you don't need a passport to come here and it's way cheaper than going to Spain, Latin America, or anything like that. And specifically the program I'm going through is called the National Student Exchange and I'm so very fortunate that they chose me to be one of their vloggers this semester. In a couple of weeks, they'll start posting on their YouTube channel videos from different students at different universities for the program, but we'll talk about our experiences. I'm totally going to link that and this bio, my personal bio. If any of you are curious what it's like studying here in Puerto Rico.
I just thought it'd be really good to catch everyone up about where I am in my life, especially because I haven't been posting a lot. But there are also still a lot of bookstores here where I'm staying at. There's literally three bookstores here, um, and I brought a couple of books with me that hopefully I'm going to get time to read. One is Little Women, which I have with me right here. It is also a new movie with Emma Watson. So I thought I was going to get to read it before I left, but that didn't happen. And I have my camera right now propped up on another book and it's called Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football and it's by John Urschel who is a former NFL player, I believe for the Ravens. And now he is studying Math at MIT getting his PhD. So that's really cool. I am a math major and it's really interesting reading about somebody who left the NFL to go do math at MIT.
I've seen so many beautiful places since arriving in San Juan, making so many beautiful videos I have to use in the videos for the NSE program. But there's still lots of other things. I just wanted to share here on my personal Instagram book review and just talk about some things I really like about the experience and just in general for anyone, anyone who's interested in studying abroad in Puerto Rico. Don't think you can't afford it. This program is wonderful. You pay tuition to your home university, and you pay for the residence hall here. So the residence hall here is $1,200 a semester. I don't know what it's like for any of you, but where I stayed at in South Carolina, one of the cheapest dorm's I stayed at was $3,600 a semester. So this dorm is one third of the price. I feel like it's just so affordable and I feel like with study abroad, a lot of people are like, "No, I cannot afford it". This is a really good deal. So, if any of you have any questions about coming to this University of Puerto Rico, please don't hesitate to message me.
So hopefully as the weeks continue, I can keep talking about my experience and just thank you so much to everyone who's been following my book review page. It's not like a lot of people, but it means a lot that you guys care about books. And even when I wasn't posting people still to look at the videos. So I hope you guys like experiencing San Juan with me this semester. Thank you!