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I Moved to the USA for College. Nobody Warned Me About This.

By Cleangirl · April 2025 · Life & Real Talk

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Let me set the scene. I'm from India. I dreamed of studying in America — the land of big campuses, fall leaves, and finding yourself in a library montage like in the movies. I was convinced my life was about to become a Pinterest board.

It did not become a Pinterest board.

"Beta, America mein bahut acha rahega." — Every aunty ever. Sir, I am eating cereal for dinner and questioning every life decision I have ever made.

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One Day on Campus. One.

So here's the thing nobody puts in the brochure — I have exactly ONE day of in-person classes per week. One. The rest is online. From my apartment. In my pajamas. Which sounds amazing until you realise you moved 8,000 miles away from your family to sit in front of a laptop screen in a different timezone.

I could have done this from my bedroom in India. With my mum's food. And zero rent. But here I am, paying for the EXPERIENCE of being in America, and my experience is mostly just my WiFi connection and the occasional squirrel outside my window.

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$6,500 a Semester. Let That Sink In.

That's not a typo. Six thousand five hundred dollars. Per semester. Four semesters. I'll let you do the math because honestly I cannot do it anymore without feeling a little dizzy.

You know what $6,500 is in Indian rupees? It is a number that would make my entire extended family go silent at a wedding. Like a pin drop silence. Massi pausing her gossip silence.

And for that amount, what am I getting? Online lectures I could technically watch from Jaipur, a student ID that gets me 10% off at a café I can't afford anyway, and access to a campus gym I've been to exactly twice.

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The Expenses Nobody Talks About

Before I came here everyone said — "oh it's expensive but you'll manage." Manage. Interesting word. Let me tell you what managing looks like. Rent that is more than what some people pay in a year back home. Groceries where a packet of decent dal costs you the same as a full meal used to. And don't even get me started on healthcare — I once got a small cut and genuinely considered whether it was bad enough to justify the cost of going to a doctor.

I have become a person who reads every single label at the grocery store, not for the ingredients — but for the price. I stand in the aisle doing mental currency conversion like some kind of sad human calculator. "That's 400 rupees for one avocado. Four hundred. For one." And then I put it back and walk away.

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And Some Days You Just Don't Feel Great About It

I want to be honest here because I think a lot of us pretend everything is fine on social media and then go home and feel very alone. Some days I genuinely wonder if I made the right choice. I miss my family. I miss food that actually tastes like home. I miss having people around who just get it without you having to explain everything.

It's not that America is bad. It's that nobody told me how hard the adjustment would be. How some evenings you're just sitting there and you feel this heaviness and you can't even explain it. You're not sad about one specific thing. You're just far from everything familiar and some days that is a lot to carry.

And that's okay. It's okay to admit that. You don't have to post a smiling photo every week to prove it was worth it.

"Are you loving it there?!" — Yes aunty, I am loving my $7 oat milk and my weekly crisis. Living the dream.

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But Also — Here I Am.

Despite all of this, I'm still here. Still showing up. Still doing the online classes in my pyjamas with my coffee, still figuring out the bus routes, still learning how to be a person in a country that wasn't built with me in mind. And there is something quietly brave about that, even on the hard days.

I'm not going to wrap this up with some big inspirational quote. I don't have a neat lesson for you. What I have is this — if you're going through the same thing, you're not dramatic. You're not weak. It's genuinely hard, and you don't have to pretend otherwise.

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Are you going through something similar? Whether you're an international student, someone far from home, or just someone who needed to hear that it's okay to struggle — I want to hear from you. Drop your story in the comments. Let's talk about it for real. 💜