There are just some things that can make an MSU student’s life more stressful than normal.
Loads of homework due the day after fall break, dealing with parking services on a rainy day and 5 a.m. fire alarm pulls in Ruby Hall are some of those things.
Other more serious things, however, are sometimes unavoidable, and rather than inconveniences, they are things that students must deal with and overcome in regards to what they truly want to do with their lives.
These range from overcoming the giant wall of being a foreign student, to taking on a time-consuming, detail-driven major like graphic design, to managing the added pressure of being a student athlete. Any one of those things has the potential to push a college student to his/her limit.
To say the least, all three combined would be just about unbearable.
Bulldog volleyball players and roommates Cristina Jucan and Ioana Demian, a senior and junior, respectively, both hail from Romania and major in graphic design.
The girls played together on the Romanian Junior Championships title-winning team in 2004 before arriving in Starkville.
Of all the obstacles that face a foreign student, overcoming the language barrier is arguably the toughest. Remarkably, neither Jucan nor Demain enrolled in any special English-as-second-language program. The girls said they learned it by being tossed into the fire, essentially.
“You’re exposed to it a lot and you’re basically forced to learn it as you live day-to-day,” Jucan said. “I just learned it from being on the team.”
Demian added that the Southern accent of Starkville people added a different aspect to the challenge of learning the language. She said it took her about a week to get used to it.
Although Jucan and Demian didn’t use any program on campus to learn English, MSU offers foreign students aid in conquering the subject. The university has an entire English as a second language department, which teaches many of MSU’s student athletes. The athletic department also has an international student adviser for athletes to use if needed.
Jucan and Demian also bear the weight of being athletes and all that goes into it. They have to pack in practices, workouts, occasional interviews, study halls, and in some weeks, road trips, into their not-so-flexible schedules.
The girls have not only survived the pressure and the stress; they have thrived.
Demian currently leads the MSU offense with 164 kills, averaging 2.83 per set. She is second on the team with 117 digs.
Jucan hasn’t had such good fortune this season. She led the Bulldog offense through the beginning of the season before re-injuring her back during the Bulldog Club Invitational, currently sidelining her. Still, Jucan remains third on the team in kills, and is still the Bulldogs’ only senior.
Fifth-year head volleyball coach Tina Seals said she is more concerned about the girls’ grades and academic performance than their on-the-field activity.
“They have a lot of discipline,” Seals said. “Our stance is academics first.”
But it’s not like the girls have chosen easy majors to study. To go alongside being foreign student athletes, Jucan and Demian have both chosen to go into graphic design, a major and field of study requiring a lot of work, competitiveness and attention to detail.
Jucan did not hesitate to compare the field of graphic design to athletics.
“It’s like another sport,” Jucan said. “You have to engage in the activity. You have to get experience. You have to practice. It’s an all-day kind of thing, just like volleyball.”
Jucan was originally a double-major in sports communication and broadcasting. She dropped broadcasting and replaced it with foreign languages. She eventually decided to switch to graphic design, mostly because it was something she enjoyed doing.
Coach Seals has felt the fallout of the girls’ busy schedules, and has even felt the recent pain secondarily.
“We’ve had some instances in which they have become so stressed with schoolwork that we tell them to miss practice so they can get it done,” Seals said.
Seals added that her daughter has also decided to study art, so she gave up volleyball her senior year of high school to pursue it.
Most foreign students would probably agree that the more time spent practicing speaking and listening to English and getting involved in American culture, the better you are at it.
Similarly, most graphic design majors would probably agree that classes and assignments are time-consuming. It’s a field in which the more time you devote to make everything perfect, the better your final product usually is.
Both learning English and graphic design sound an awful lot like volleyball.
Jucan summed it up when asked how she can take on three huge tasks without breaking down and giving up: “If you want something, you have to work for it. And once you work for it, you actually start to enjoy it.”