By Isa Ghani

Daily Titan Multimedia Editor

My sister says I complain too much. Apparently, all she’s taken away from reading this column is how much I don’t like America. This isn’t true – I love America.

What’s not to love about it? There are beautiful women all over the place, garbage disposals in the sinks and George W. Bush will never be president of the United States ever again.

But maybe it’s time to talk about what I love about America. One of the best things about my new life here is Cal State Fullerton. Hold on, before you put your paper down in disgust, hear me out.

Yes, the CSU is in the dumps right now, and we all know the education system here is slowly turning into mush. But there is so much that is good about the system.

Here, we get to pick what classes we want. Each course we take only lasts three to four months and then we never need the information we learned.

In the British system, which is in use in many places around the world, every year consists of two exams – each worth 50 percent of your grade. Mess up once, and you have to retake an entire year.

Oh, and did I mention that exams are all cumulative? Believe me, it sucks trying to remember two year’s worth of classes for one major exam.

In college or university here, your professors are so relaxed, laid back and best of all, genuinely interested in what they have to teach.

Fine, there may be some exceptions to this rule. But I have had professors at CSUF who speak about history as if it were their best friend. You won’t get that anywhere else, where elderly professors just drone on and on, teaching the same class, in the same way they have done it for years.

What also gets me is the dynamics of the student-teacher relationship. Back where I am from, there is a big division between faculty and students. I’m not saying things are estranged between us, just rather … chilly. It’s a respect-your-elders thing, where you don’t cross lines and become overly familiar. Here, my professors buy me a beer.

In America, you get to protest. In fact, that’s almost all students are good for – protesting what they don’t like. I just learned about how in the 1970s CSUF students threw rotten fruit at Ronald Reagan.

That just blows my mind. The last time I tried to organize a protest over some inane rules about girls not being allowed to wear miniskirts or shorts to school (true story), we ended up getting more rules imposed upon us and more rights taken away.

But in America, we can set fire to school buildings, storm through classes and lead protest marches – amazing.

Being a student at CSUF is wonderful. Recently, I’ve taken friends, my girlfriend and my sister on tours of the campus. And in showing it to other people, I began to realize how great it was. Each time I discovered something new.

Did you know there was a giant ice cream behind the Visual Arts Center? Or that a great bald eagle occasionally inhabits the upper roof of College Park? Plus, it’s pretty cool to say to people, “Yeah, my school has a bowling alley, so what?”

We have a pub on campus, a gaming area downstairs, great computer labs and all sorts of activities available to us. I know I have given Associated Students Inc. some flak before, but kudos to them for organizing the Becker Amphitheatre shows on Wednesdays or the Pub Nights on Thursdays. And it’s nice to get free hot dogs once in a while, at least I know where some of my tuition fees are going … Just kidding, guys!

So it saddens me when students come to school, go to class and take off as soon as class is over. I’m not advocating staying on campus all day, but it seems that with an enrollment of 35,000, there sure aren’t that many people on campus during the day. It’s the commuter school thing, I get it. But when we have an OC Weekly-selected “Best Downtown of Orange County” minutes away and some pretty nice hang out spots on and off campus, I don’t see why we can’t do all our hanging out here.

It’s a bit of a shame that although I’m really enthusiastic about what my school here in America has to offer, no one else really is. It’s also a shame that I’m just getting into the swing of things and California cuts the CSU budget by over a billion dollars.

Oh, I guess I just found something new to complain about. Yay.