American undergraduates studying abroad pose a stark contrast with their foreign hosts, some students recently returned from overseas noted. Faced with the availability of formerly forbidden fruit, the students said, American students abroad often lack the restraint of their foreign peers toward alcohol and social drinking.
These differences may stem from alcohol’s relevance within foreign cultures, students said. Since international drinking ages may be lower, nonexistent or not heavily enforced, students overseas often have more experience with alcohol prior to entering the university environment.
Kaitlyn Hay ’10, who studied in Italy this past fall, explained that though “there are soda machines that have beer and wine, it’s hard to find a crazy, drunken Italian student.” In Italy, she noted, alcoholic beverages are “just any other drink, like Sprite.” Hay is also a senior photographer for The Daily Princetonian.
Spanish students also refrained from the heavy drinking commonly found on Thursday or Saturday nights at the Street, said Rachel Nesbitt ’10, who spent a semester in Spain. “People were still drinking a lot, but because alcohol had always been one of the options, they were a little rowdy, yet still within control.”
At Oxford, drinking is an integral part of the culture, Karen Tay ’10 said. Students regularly patronize the different colleges’ numerous pubs, she explained, where drinking provides a context for social interaction rather than just an emotional panacea.
“People do go there and get drunk, but people go every night and most just sit around with friends and hang out,” Tay said, adding that drinking wasn’t a big part of her life here or at Oxford.
When Americans students enter such an environment where alcohol is legal, they don’t conduct themselves like foreign students do, Hay said. “Once someone gets past the fact that it’s available, they continue to drink because … everyone around is drunk. They feel like they won’t have fun if they’re not drunk.”
This is very different from Italian students, who are “always in the presence of alcohol,” she said. “It’s everywhere, even in many desserts,” she added.
This is not to say that alcohol isn’t a problem for European students, however, Petra Spies GS noted.
“I think the problems [in Germany] are very similar to drinking problems here. People just seem to go through them earlier and be done with that when they enter the university,” Spies, a graduate student in the German department, said in an e-mail, though she added that she spoke based on her experiences at Universitat Potsdam near Berlin.
She explained that since people are allowed to drink “soft booze”— beer and wine, for example — at 16, high school students are the ones who “often get seriously drunk,” while most university students “seem to have grown out of all that.”
Spies added that students, particularly underage girls, are especially susceptible to the influence of “alcopops,” whose sugary flavors disguise the high alcohol content.
“I would like to think that the ‘German’ attitude to alcohol is more natural and relaxed, but recent media coverage about binge drinking and Alcopops at high school parties made me change my mind,” Spies said.
In China, alcohol poses few problems for native students, Ben Farkas ’10 said. He noted that cultural desensitization is not necessarily the sole explanation.
“As far as I could tell, among Chinese students heavy drinking isn’t that prevalent. They have a different attitude towards it,” Ben Farkas ‘10 said. He added that this may be due to the more intense, focused work ethic manifested by Chinese students compared to their American counterparts.
Many universities overseas differ from American ones in that they lack central campuses. This makes getting to a venue to drink heavily problematic, Farkas said, and thus discourages frequent, heavy drinking.
“If you wanted to drink a little, you could do it in a room, but if you wanted to party, you had to go off campus and take a taxi back,” Farkas explained. He added that the PIB workload made such excursions difficult.
Spies noted also that the integration of undergraduate and graduate campuses at German universities could add the “stigma of being immature” to other negative effects of intoxication.
“You just didn’t want to embarrass yourself getting drunk like an immature teenager in front of a bunch of 25-year-olds,” Spies explained. “In fact, we often laughed at those who still hadn’t learned their lesson and found it ridiculous when drunk ‘grown-ups’ made fools of themselves.”
Some Americans are already adept in this arena, Princeton students said. Inexperienced with liberal drinking standards, several students who studied abroad were embarrassed by the behavior of their fellow countrymen.
“When I was with fellow American students, they fulfilled the stereotype of drunken Americans that Italians expected,” Hay noted.
Hay described one particularly memorable example: “One night we went to a bar and my Americans friends were asking for a keg. Italians have no concept of a keg of beers, so they ended up getting a bucket and filling it with beer,” she said. “All the Italians in the bar were staring and probably thinking ‘What are these crazy Americans doing?’ “
Nesbitt related similar experiences.
“The majority of American students went crazy when they realized there were no restrictions on alcohol. They got out of control sometimes, and it was really embarrassing,” she said, adding that it was a “sad” reflection on students from the United States.
Americans should try to adopt other countries’ attitudes toward alcohol consumption, Hay said. She noted, “I’m not anti-alcohol, but there’s no need to drink to excess.”
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