Marija Venta transferred to Longwood University this past semester. She didn’t transfer from NOVA or Virginia Beach, though. Venta hails from Slovenia, a country whose capital is a cool 4,554.47 miles away from Farmville. The flight from Slovenia to the Richmond International Airport would take approximately 12 hours and 30 minutes.
To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of sitting through 15 50-minute classes. Add in the fact that it’s a boring and tedious trip. So imagine 15 50-minute math classes. It also costs over $2,000 to make that trip. That’s the monetary equivalent to over 230 meal swipes into the dining hall.
Venta said she had never been to the United States before, and initially when she got to the U.S., she found there were many aspects of life here that she had to adjust to. This applied to even the little things like how she talked to people.
Venta said in the U.S., people are much more “gentle” in how they talk to each other.
“Everything here is sugar-coated and nicely put,” she said. But, Venta says, in Europe people generally are straight forward, just as a matter of course.
“Here, I could say something that would go unnoticed at home. Here, (however), people are like ‘hahaha, oh you’re being so straightforward’ and I’m thinking ‘no, I’m not!’”
Venta hears one question frequently from her fellow students: “Oh, why would you come to such a small school in the middle of nowhere?”
Her journey to Longwood started with her passion for tennis, and an email she received from her now coach. Longwood had offered her a place on its tennis team. Even with this initial concentration on the sport she had been playing since she was four, Venta’s interest in Longwood had everything to do with learning.
“(I’m) still learning a lot of lessons (here) that maybe I wouldn’t have learned somewhere else,” said Venta. “For me this whole experience is about (building) on my life lessons.”