Hail to Austral! Today we had our first experience at Austral, our host university here in Argentina. The university itself presented many similarities to Pitt, but the largest contrast I observed was regarding student life and university culture.

The most overwhelming similarity is Austral’s hospital affiliation. Just like Pitt and UPMC, there is a top-ranking hospital that is part of the university. In our lecture, it was mentioned that this allows them to bring in income and have more facilities to conduct research. The only disparity is that UPMC is a separate business entity from Pitt, while Austral and Hospital University of Austral are the same entity. Another similarity with the university structure was how different disciplines have designated areas on the campus. There was a business building like Pitt has Sennott Square, an engineering building, and a law building. This similarity surprises me, given that the size of the university is much smaller than Pitt, you would not think that they would have enough students in each program to have such large separate buildings.

The biggest difference that I noticed was in the gender ratio I observed among the students. There seemed to be a much higher number of female students than male students when at Pitt the ratio is almost exactly 50/50. This may have been because we were in the nursing school area of campus and nursing is a female-dominated field, but I am interested to see if this observation holds for the rest of our trip. I also observed a visual lack of school pride. I don’t think this means that pride for Austral does not exist, but it must be shown differently than at Pitt. On Pitt’s campus, it would be a challenge to walk more than thirty seconds without seeing someone wearing a clothing item that says “Pitt.” At Austral, I did not see a single student that owned or wore anything with the university’s name on it. Additionally, we asked one of the representatives from Austral if there were any shirts we could buy and she said there may be a few that exist but it is just something that they do not typically do.

After observing these things at Austral, we did a bus tour of the city to get more familiar with the area and find places we may want to visit later in the trip. So far, Buenos Aires is such a beautiful and vibrant city with so many things to offer and I am looking forward to exploring it all!

¡Hasta mañana!