American Stereotypes and Starting a new Project

Last night, I spoke with a number of students from other countries and enjoyed discussing the way that they saw America.  It is a bit of a long story, but suffice it to say that I ended up in a conversation with a Canadian, a Russian, three French people, and a bunch of the people in my program.  I learned about their views on American stereotypes, American culture, and American foreign policy.

The Russian man told me that many Russians like South Park because that show freely expresses ideas. He liked a lot of American movies but I had not heard of many of them. The only one that I recognized was the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

According to the French man, there was support for the war in Afghanistan and he pointed to the fact that the French military is there as well. He repeatedly pointed to situations where the French and US military were working together.  He also pointed out that England and France needed the large military of the US to be able to have a presence in many countries at once. He was strongly against the war in Iraq and he pointed out that there are many ruthless dictators all over the world so why did the US choose Iraq in particular.

I enjoyed conversing with these people in a mixture of French and English. I tried to listen to their conversations in French but again they would generally speak too fast for me to understand.  I also feel like they did not speak loud enough for me to hear them unless they were talking to me directly (perhaps I need to continue to try to clean out my ears).

Lastly, these people had intelligent views on stereotypes. When I first asked the question about stereotypes, all of them said something to the effect of we know that those aren't true so we don't like to say them. They had met people from the US and they did not fit their stereotype. But after they insisted, they told me about how Americans can be loud. They also pointed to Texans.

At lunch today, I discussed stereotypes with the people that I work with. They were much more willing to tell us about American stereotypes.  One of the more interesting ones is the idea that Americans do not have any culture. So when I think of American culture, I think of movies, TV shows and food. However, when they spoke of culture, they thought of art and history. I thought that was an interesting difference.

One big update from work is that it seems to me that the project that I was working on during the start of the summer is not going to work out.  Basically, I was looking into a measurement technique and it seems that the method will not be useful to the lab. So I am going to stop working on this project soon and I will be moving on to another project for the rest of the summer.  I will be looking into improving their optimization algorithms for the mirrors that they are using. I am pretty excited about this project because it is something that I have been wanting to learn about for a while.

I feel good about experience so far because I am accustomed to difficulty in research and I still learned useful things. After doing research last summer and struggling through physics labs this year, I am comfortable with research not going smoothly. Additionally, I feel like I learned a lot from this experience.  I learned matlab and got experience searching for and sifting through literature for my project. More than anything, I am happy to start a new project.