F1: A Student in the Land of the Free

Every year, over one hundred thousand students cross two continents or an ocean to come to a land of freedom. Every year a new generation goes through the adaptation, and the acclimatisation to a place where material freedom is real and expectations of existence are varied. Everyone takes their first plunge into the Great Melting Pot. Weary of being sheltered and seeking the unfamiliar, Pratik Satpute joined the horde of students in the quest for the American Master's Degree. In the height of the Trump hysteria of 2017, when nobody really knew what the new rules were, warnings against the move were issued from all corners. Finding himself in the Golden State of California, with all the new-found independence of a graduate of a girls-only school, wanderlust led him to find dinosaurs in Texas, blizzards in Utah, and American football fans in Santa Barbara. Exploring the country and the New World on a student's budget and the idiocy of youth, he found not only wildly different attitudes, but a new sense of self-preservation, and a new sense of self birthed from the culture shock-induced growing pains - all culminating in a sometimes self-deprecating, often cynically optimistic view of a student in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave: The United States of America.