When Hattie Rainford walks around the Rose Hill campus, she blends in perfectly. While her broken ankle doesn’t allow her to walk as effortlessly as those around her, as she emerges from the on-campus Starbucks with a coffee and her laptop, she looks just like the rest of us.

The look is deceiving, however. When Rainford starts to speak, her Liverpool-born English accent gives her away immediately. Every year, Fordham welcomes a couple dozen exchange students from all over the world. As for the fall 2019 semester, there are 22 exchange students divided over both campuses. Rainford is one of them.

When talking with Rainford for longer, her Britishness seems more apparent with every sentence.

“I miss the tea me and my family drink,” she says. “We get our tea delivered in a basket … I’m not even joking … The tea-man comes to our house.”

Although she grew up in England, her home university is the University of Amsterdam (UvA), which makes her an international student currently studying abroad. It’s not as confusing as it sounds.

“I’m already at a home away from home,” Rainford says. “Now just times two.”

She majors in Literary Studies and Cultural Analysis, a major she describes as “very hippie-dippie.” The Brit decided on studying in Amsterdam, rather than in her home country, because of the financial benefit. Tuition in England is more than five times as expensive as in the Netherlands, according to Rainford, so she packed her bags and moved to the Dutch capital. But why then, for somebody who chose her school based on the monetary gain, is she spending a semester in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world? Simple: “I met a boy,” she says.

So Rainford packed her bags once again and flew across the Atlantic. She now finds herself living in an apartment just off of the Rose Hill campus with her Bronx-born boyfriend. Even though she has lived in multiple European countries throughout her life, American college life is a whole new terrain.

One thing Rainford can’t wrap her head around at Fordham is the merchandise.

“This would just never happen at home,” she says. “If I wear an UvA-shirt at the UvA, I would get shamed to death.” She finds it mortifying to promote her own school on its campus.

Now that she’s here, however, she’s happy to participate.

“But now I’ve got a Fordham T-shirt, and I’m going to wear that,” she says.

Rainford is certainly a fish out of water at times, but a happy one. One of her Fordham friends took her to homecoming, which she enjoyed, though not without its share of confusion.

“Homecoming … still don’t know what on earth that is about,” she says. “I came home, I guess?”

The American traditions and quirks take some getting used to. Apart from that, Rainford considers her time at Fordham to be a valuable experience. One of her motivations behind choosing Fordham was the networking it would allow her to do. She saw an opportunity, and she took it.

“I think it’s a very American thing, to use your college as a credential,” she says. “The name is worth almost as much as the degree itself; I can say I went to Fordham, and that’s going to mean something to someone.”

Hattie realized that New York is where it’s happening, and she plans on returning to the Big Apple after graduating in Amsterdam. But while she’s here now, she takes advantage of her position.

“I’ve figured out it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” she says. “Networking is even more important here, and you can meet even more important people here.”

For her classes at Fordham, Rainford spends most of her time writing. She aims to write as a career, which is a departure from what she thought she would end up being: a theatre actress.

“I think I’ve sold my soul,” she says.

Many years of her adolescent life were spent in a small theater in England, both on and off stage. She is trained in opera and musical theater and has been on-stage in a variety of productions. Even now, it’s hard to stop her from spending hours on end telling stories from her theatrical European years. But Rainford has moved on, and her ambition to lead a life on stage has turned into a range of anecdotal party material.

Rainford wants to write online media content and hopes to be able to write about the things she truly enjoys. She is currently practicing the latter at Fordham.

For one of her classes, Writing for Online Media, Rainford created a blog on “everything I would have done in New York, but with a broken ankle.” The name of the blog: “Cast Away. I love that I came up with that name. I am full of puns.”

When Rainford talks about New York City in Fiction — her favorite class — and its teacher, her voice changes from her usual bantering Brit to something that tells you about how valuable the class has been to her.

“His name is Lowery McClendon,” she says. “Honestly, you should have interviewed him, I just want to be his best friend.”

Rainford harkened back to a time early in the semester, when her broken ankle still required her to walk on crutches. The elevators were broken, and she was physically unable to walk up the stairs to her class.

“He had moved the entire class downstairs for me, which was so nice,” she says. “I could still go to this lovely class.”

Rainford looks back on her semester at Fordham with gratitude and appreciation for the experience and the people she has met. When asked how it feels to be one of just three UvA students to get accepted as an exchange student at Fordham, she loudly exclaims, “They let this idiot in? Ridiculous!”

Although her ankle may cause her to be a bit slow in pace, her wit is nothing but quick. Get to know her over coffee — although she’ll probably have tea instead.