Once again, I find myself desperately behind in my writing. Here's my attempt to catch up!
The first week of classes were extremely stressful, since I still hadn't figured out which classes I'd take and how to sort everything out. It's very overwhelming being plunked down into a completely new bureaucratic system with no idea how everything operates. When I had a schedule clash, did I need to just not take the class? Ask the study abroad adviser to fix it? Ask the professor to fix it? Do something complicated to fix it myself? Unlike the local students, as a study abroad person I didn't have the capability online to add classes myself, so I had to go in and meet with advisers and pester them via email quite a bit to get anything fixed. But everything is finally worked out, and here's what I'm taking:
Making Sense of America: The US Since 1945 - Yeah, it's a US history class. Yeah, it's 100 level. Yeah, I'm partially taking it because holy shit it's going to be easy. But at the same time, I've always been a little annoyed that we never covered anything in history beyond the Vietnam war era, almost like the late '70s and the '80s were just too recent in the minds of instructors at least for them to feel like students needed formal teaching on their events. The end of the cold war might still have a presence in the culture of today (yeah, I've seen the videos of the Berlin Wall falling), but it'll be interesting to see how these events are taught. So far the class isn't exactly in-depth, but I'm okay with that. Three assignments due over the course of the semester and no final exam? I'm okay with that, too. We've had lectures so far on McCarthyism/the fear of communism and on '50s pop culture.
Indigenous Australian Studies: This class was a last-minute addition, and as such I've only been to two lectures and one tutorial so far, but it'll probably really help me understand more about the issues of race and class and culture and law that aren't really visible from outside of Australia. I'll have to update more as I continue with the class, since I haven't seen enough yet to comment further!
Fire in the Australian Landscape: My favorite class so far, Fire is a forestry/environments class about bush fires in Australia. I'm super excited to be learning about all the aspects of fires and fire management and yeah. Weirdly geeking out about fires, but it's going to be a really nice class. Not too much homework, either, just a group project resulting in a 5-minute presentation (FIVE MINUTES!) and a longer paper halfway through the semester in addition to the exam in November. Also I have homework to burn some newspaper and matches and candles. After an intro to fire environments, last week's lectures were about the relationships/impacts of water on bush fires.
Sedimentary Geology: So there's a tiny bit of backstory to this (and my whole current schedule in general); here goes. I was originally set to take a 300-level Australian history class, a 200-level Japanese conversation class, Seds, and Fire. I got intimidated by the high level of the history class and the blackboard for the Japanese class, and decided I wanted to switch out of them. I also found a different geology class, Economic Geology, that sounded really interesting and isn't like anything offered at UPS. So I got switched into the American history and went to Economic Geology to check it out. I'm sure it would have been a really interesting class, but it also has the well-deserved reputation in the geo department as the hardest geology class. It had 5 1500-word papers due over the course of the semester. I decided it was a liiiittle too much for me, wanting to have a fun semester abroad, not a "holy shit I'm writing geology papers all the time" semester abroad, and went back to Seds as my choice. I added Indigenous Studies after I decided not to do Econ Geo.
Anyway! Seds is really interesting and really chill so far. There are two lab sections (pardon me, practicals) for the class, one on Friday afternoons and one on Thursday mornings. Not wanting to have to do work on Friday afternoons, I opted for Thursday morning, and hey, there's only 5 people in this prac! The pracs seem totally manageable so far (and we had samples from the Cascades last week), and the evaluation for the course is 2 quizzes, 2 graded pracs, a prac test, an exam during November. No papers! Couldn't count on that for a Barry-taught class, that's for sure. So far we've been focusing on microfossils!
Hopefully I've caught myself up...OH WAIT
I actually almost forgot to write about this, wow. Jack is visiting on Friday! And despite the supposed limits on the number of nights people are allowed to have guests in the apartments, I've been approved to have him stay with me for the entire time, eleven nights. I'm stoked as fuck. (Hope nobody reading this is offended by my swears!) See y'all next time I decide to show my face around here.
