 It would not be a visit to a university without some student interviews and today I'm going to give you a bunch of interviews with West Virginia University students. Let's talk to some Mountaineers. I'm Mackenzie, I'm from Moorfield and I'm studying biology. Studying biology, awesome. Are you planning on doing like a medicine track with that or? Maybe. Maybe, okay. Possibility, cool. How long have you been here? Four days. Four days, okay. Fresh, like just got here. Okay, awesome. So what are your initial impressions? I like it. It seems pretty cool. What made you like the place? How did you decide to come here? I don't really know. I like it. It's pretty. It is pretty. Plans for this year. Anything you really want to do? Any clubs you want to join? I want to go to some sporting events. Okay. Anything that has surprised you or anything you didn't expect so far coming in? Really how many people you see? Like you meet somebody new pretty much every day. Yeah, sounds good. You already making some new friends here? Yeah. All right, good. That's good to hear. Is there ever somebody who might want to come to this university? Get some good shoes to walk in. Get some good shoes to walk in. Let me just get a little bit of those. Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay. I don't know how good these are, but they look cool. Yeah, those look good. At least they look cool. So that's what matters. All right. Thank you so much, Mackenzie. Appreciate it. This is rough. While the sun was shining, I had the opportunity to talk to a bunch of engineering students over at the engineering campus. So let's start with them and then we're going to get into some international students. My name is Courtney Wright. I'm from Parkersburg, West Virginia, and I'm studying engineering. All right. Engineering. Any specific track you're looking to get into? Either mechanical or civil. I haven't decided yet. What do you think of the engineering program here so far? I really like it. When I first toured here, I thought it was really good, and I looked into a couple different colleges, but I just really like this program here. Why did you choose West Virginia University at the end of the day? I really like the environment with the rowing team, too, so I choose here. All right. Sounds good. Any advice for potential applicants? Get to meet people, because when you meet your friend group, it's really fun time. There's lots of things to do here, and it's a really exciting campus. How have you made friends here since you've started being here a student? Actually, I have just added people on Snapchat because there's Snapchats on the doors at the dorms, so yeah, you just out of one step, and then you ask them to hang out, and a lot of people are willing to do it because everyone's in the same boat. Okay. Yeah. I would never have thought of that. That seems so simple. It is. Yeah. How do you find the community here? I really like it. Everyone is really nice to each other, honestly. I haven't had any problem with anyone. Okay. I really like it. Great. I'm glad to hear that. I'm Aubrey Altizer. I study mechanical and aerospace engineering, and I'm from Nicholas County, which is about two hours from here. Sounds good. Can you tell me a little bit about your program? What is it like? It's difficult. It's tedious. There's a lot of, like, little minor things that we have to do and focus on, but it's a lot of fun. We get to do hands-on projects and work on the computer a lot. Okay. There's a lot of facilities here for that kind of stuff. They're awesome. They're so high-tech. Like, it's crazy the advancements that we have here. What made you choose West Virginia University? It's close to home, and it's so pretty on campus. I mean, I love all of the campuses here, but that was one of the main reasons. This is just, like, a pretty place to be. Yeah. Yeah, I'm getting that vibe, too. Very nice. A lot of nature. Yeah. More green than concrete. Definitely, yeah. Like, but you don't see in those places. And the PRT, which is a cool feature. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. When you have an ID, I'm running out of quarters. So how do you feel about the community here? Like, how easy is it for you to integrate and get comfortable? Everyone is super nice. Like, even my professors, they're so willing to help all of the students. You don't really meet a mean person here, or I haven't, at least. So that's good to me. All right, cool. Any advice for, like, applicants or new students here? What would you tell them to do? The earlier the better. Anything you can do early, do it early, because the quicker you get things done, the more you can just relax and enjoy being here. My name's Ashton Cole. I'm studying general engineering for now, before I figure out a specific one to go into. So you got any idea of, like, what engineering track you might want to do? No. No idea. No idea. How do you think you're going to figure that out? Probably just these general classes. We'll go into that a little bit, and then I'll figure out what I'm interested in. Okay. So how long have you been on campus? About a week. Just coming to classes. I live at home. How is it as far as, like, getting here, coming, going back and forth? You just got to figure out how long everything takes, like, the drive here, the walk up, the PRT ride to get to class. And then once you have that figured out, it's pretty easy. My name's Caden Maxey. I'm from Fairmont, West Virginia, and I'm here studying industrial engineering. I'm on my junior year right now. Okay, great. So what's the program been like so far? So industrial engineering is new to me. I recently changed from electrical engineering. But in terms of, like, department, it's pretty similar. Just difference of classes. Okay. What sparked that change? This wasn't what I thought it was. And I'm just branching out to see if this is what I think it is. Okay. So what differences are you seeing now between the two programs? Just general classes. I mean, neither one of them is going to be easy, necessarily. That wasn't what motivated my change. I feel like industrial engineering is more management-based, and electrical engineering was a lot more, like, tech-savvy stuff. Okay. So you're looking at a little more big picture operations versus the actual nitty gritty. Exactly. Okay, yeah. What do you feel like a student needs to bring to the table? So anyone can do engineering. It's definitely a very high-discipline major. Now, there's a lot of distractions in college, and it's just staying on track with that, getting your studying done, just putting in the work. Okay. How do you balance that stuff? Like, I mean, obviously you want to have some college experience, you want to have some fun, but you also got a lot of work to do. Yeah. As an engineering major, how do you find that balance? Just make your schedule, stick to it, really put precedence on some things more than others. West Virginia University has a lot of smart people in every department that want to help you. So it's just branching out, networking with those people, and then if you do that, you'll be set. I was lucky enough to find two international students. There's not a huge international population here in West Virginia. Only about 500 students from, you know, around 25,000. So we're looking at about 2% international here, but I found two of those people, so I'm going to let you hear what they have to say about their experience. Hi, I'm Paula. I'm from Spain, and I'm a teacher at TISOL, teaching English as a foreign language, and I'm also a Spanish teacher here at the university. Where did you study? In Spain, at the University of Salamanca. Okay. Why did you choose this university? Well, because I had a scholarship with the University of Salamanca, and then we had to come here for two years as a master and we were teachers at the university. How do you like the program? I love it a lot because I didn't think I'd like to be a teacher, and thanks to this, I'm planning to be a teacher in the future. Where would you like to work? I know I'd like to stay here for a few years in the United States and then return to Europe, although not in Spain. My advice is to come, discover, go out of the house, and it's a very small university, but there are a lot of people, and there are always opportunities to do anything, any activity, and there are a lot of people who are always available to help you. I like it to be in the middle of nature, to go out of parties and have fun, so you can never be quiet. There's always something to do. What surprised you the most when you came here? I was surprised that there were so many people and especially so many international people. I thought I'd come here to talk a lot, a lot in English, but then I heard that there's a huge Spanish-speaking community and I'm very grateful for that. It's like my second home, because it's also a small city that looks like mine, and then I really like it. How did you decide to transfer to West Virginia? I feel like as an international student, West Virginia is not high on most people's list, so I'm kind of curious how you got here. It's a pretty busy city compared to other cities in Ecuador, and I knew West Virginia was completely the opposite. You know, it's mountains, there's a lot of outdoors, outgoing. There is diversity for all type of countries, and I wanted to take an opportunity for me to be somewhere that I knew that I didn't feel comfortable to learn new things about me. I had a knowledge from talking to people online watching a lot of videos on YouTube. I was very, very open-minded to just try new things, going around talking to people, and I knew for sure West Virginia had a lot of resources for international students that are working so well in the part of financial aspect. Being a public institution, they can't do need-based aid for international students. Did you get any good scholarships or anything to help bring down that path? Yes, that's a good question. So they provide me a good few scholarships that one of them specifically, it was not guaranteed. I had to be here a year, but I did took the risk, did my best the first year, and then they gave me a scholarship that actually the next year helped me a lot with financial, yeah. Do you intend to stay here in the States, and look for work here? Do you feel that you'll be able to do that? I was lucky enough, and I worked actually very hard to get an internship over the summer. It was in a big company, is CamTrack, which is the train system in the U.S. They go all around the U.S. and a few cities on the Canada. I'm happy now in this company, and I hope to stay connected with them after graduation. How did you connect with people and other students on campus? I think that's one of the hardest things, the first couple of weeks or even months, because you're in a place that you're going to have a lot of, like cultural shock in a lot of ways. On Fridays, we have a specific place to meet all international students, to just chat, to know each other, to meet new people. We had someone from Guatemala just go into 30 people or 40 people, which was really good. I can say that I never tried Guatemala food, but it was a very, very good experience. What advice would you give to some internationals who maybe are considering transferring or applying to the U.S.? Do a lot of research. Try to reach out to students or alumni, and that's their experience. Maybe have another perspective, and that will help you to get through your final decision where you're going to go. As a last advice, I know it sounds scary, and I know it sounds like very risky sometimes. It's always good to get supported by people that actually want to help you, because you cannot do it alone, and I can say that from my experience. Most of the time, we think that we don't need help. We don't need to reach out to anyone. We can find things by ourselves, but it's actually not true. Just by asking for help, you can meet a lot of good people. The best way to get through things is by supporting each other.