My Journey as a Student-Athlete in the USA

In 2022 I had a dream, going to the United Stated of America as a student-athlete. So, in 27th of July 2023 I started what has turned out to be the most difficult experience of my life to this day. I went to the United States of America as a student-athlete. Six months after I was returning back to Portugal and friends of mine or people that knew me would ask “What happened?” “Didn´t you adapt?” “Didn´t you succeed?” “Didn’t you like it?”.

So today I will be sharing my overseas experience as a student-athlete. What I went through, what really happened, some differences that I felt, what went wrong, etc:

In 27th of July 2023, as soon as I arrived in Chicago and I checked my phone, I saw that I was 11000 km away from home, my family, friends, basically everything that I knew until that moment and I was alone, I didn't know anyone...but I had one more plane to catch, this time to Fort Wayne, Indiana close to Huntington where I would be staying.

First month was very hard for me, I had to adapt to a new lifestyle and I felt a giant culture shock. For example, In Portugal I was used to have dinner at 20:00/21:00 and there I was having dinner at 17:00 and going to bed at 21:00 because I was exhausted, I was waking up at 5:30, still dark outside, so we could get one practice in first thing in the morning while fasting so we could get in shape faster because of preseason and we were doing some fitness tests almost every day along this first month. After practice we would finally have some breakfast and then we would do community service for the rest of the day, we only stopped to eat. So, as you can imagine I was exhausted at night and I didn’t have energy to do anything.

Pre-season comes to an end, and classes and non-conference games will start, at first everything was going well until it starts going bad. I was not performing my best in soccer and that started affecting me and it was like a giant snowball going downhill. I lost all the confidence on myself. Going through that alone without the family support that I was used to was very hard but my teammates that at that moment were like brothers to me, they helped me go through this bad chapter. “Soccer wise” I didn’t perform good overall. I think I took too long to adapt to a different playstyle; it was more physical; I had less time to think. I think, maybe, I should’ve spent more time in the gym.

Education was very different too, I was majoring in Computer Science and there while you are majoring at Computer Science you will take classes like Psychology, for example, and others that are not related to computer science due to the type of education. It is called Liberal Arts Education; I remember writing an essay comparing education from Portugal and education there for a class called "English Research and Writing". Before going on this adventure, I did a year of university in Portugal at NOVA, School of Science and Technology and I felt like in Portugal education was better and I would be better prepared if I took education in Portugal. “Academic wise” I was doing well. Classes from Computer Science core I was doing really good and the others I was just doing good. I think I was averaging B+ which is 85-89%.

When soccer season was over, I had more time to explore the surroundings so I visited some big cities. I went to Chicago 3 or 4 times and Indianapolis 2 or 3 times. I went more times to Fort Wayne which was a lot closer to where I was, 20 minutes’ drive, it was a big city but not a major city. My dream was to study close to a major city, next to the skyscrapers. And where I was a little bit dislocated from major cities. I was 3 hours away from Chicago.

First semester is almost over and I had to make a big decision, either coming back to Portugal and then returning to the USA or coming back to Portugal and stay there. Overall things were not going well, I thought that I would be better in Portugal so I made the decision. Of course the idea of living in the US is still in my head, I would love to have the experience of working for one of the FAANG.

I don’t think this experience was a failure, I think quite the opposite. I don’t regret going, I loved the experience and I am grateful that I had it. I feel like this experience earned me a lot of personal growth, I made some friends for life and this will be a lifetime experience that I will never forget.