While preparing for my move to France for my semester abroad in Paris, I brainstormed a lot of possible obstacles I could and most likely would face within the first month of being here. Homesickness, cultural shock, serious FOMO on events back home, and the somewhat daunting task of making new friends all made the cut but the one obstacle I did not predict slapped me in the face during the first day of orientation: What does is mean to be “American”?

My two-day seminar featured about 60, predominantly American students crammed into a un-air-conditioned room being bombarded with dozens of PowerPoint slides describing how to successfully acclimate to Parisian life. While I’ll admit that a good portion of that PowerPoint presentation never fully caught my attention, a slide featuring a short video describing essentially “which questions not to ask” and “what makes Americans stand out” quickly caught my attention. Let me be clear, I didn’t find this video to be interesting because I found it accurate; I was captivated by it because it described an “American” identity so contrary to my self-image and that of practically everyone I know in the States.

One Australian student reminisced on meeting American exchange students saying that he was frequently asked, “Do you ride kangaroos to school?” Another Chinese student remarked that American students gave way too many hugs to strangers and generally didn’t understand social rules regarding personal space. Too many students warned American’s not to go abroad, go out to bars,and start chanting “USA! USA!” at any and all opportunities. These are but a few examples. Many more students were laughing at American students and how it’s easy to notice American people abroad because we’re so boisterous, loud, and generally obese. While I can't really argue with our reputation as a generally obese country, I was forced to think about what it truly means to be “American.” This confusion was only compounded during the rest of these presentations that described the trouble Americans usually encountered while abroad: binge drinking. I’m not going to even try to dispute that binge drinking isn’t a problem in the U.S. but hearing horror stories about the repercussions some students received really made me think about how others view Americans.

Story #1: American student goes out drinking with friends and ends up in jail and doesn’t have the opportunity to leave until late the next afternoon. In short, she had too much to drink, got ditched by her friends, ended up crying on the curb and picked up by Parisian police. Story #2: two American girls spend the night drinking with friends, miss the last metro train (last train leaves at 1:30 a.m.) and decide to wait in the metro for the first train (which leaves at 5:30 in the morning). These girls pass out on the train, wake up in the train car parked in a garage with all of their belongings gone. Stolen. Au revoir. I quickly chalked these instances up to lack of common sense (like who leaves their drunk friend behind outside of a bar??), but then reality hit me: this is how foreign people view American youth. Never mind that I don’t personally align with any of the people mentioned in this article (aka I know that kangaroos aren’t modes of transportation and I would never leave a drunk friend behind and alone at night in Paris), once foreigners peg me as American, all these stereotypes and “worst-case scenarios” jump to the forefront of their minds. It’s rather unsettling. I’d like to think that being a young American means more than binge-drinking, ignorant questions and having a lack of common sense. Looking at those around me, I’d rather characterize us as explorers, students, intelligent humans and good people. I could go on and note that the current state of our presidential election isn’t helping in transforming foreign perceptions of Americans in general, but instead, I guess I’ll just try to challenge existing negative stereotypes in Paris one jail-cell-free weekend at a time.