So far, the schooling system in France has been completely different to the one I’m used to at Santa Clara. I came into it with expectations that things like signing up for classes and figuring out which ones to take would be much different than what I am used to – of course, it’s a completely different country with a different way of doing things – but I did not expect the school to be so… disorganized. I’ll explain. Firstly, when signing up for classes, we go online and pick the ones we want (without any guidance, whatsoever) but these courses we choose do not show a time or place. We can go to a different part of the website to see the times of all the courses and each section of each course, but this is pointless because we do not choose our section. In fact, the following day, after I had chosen the classes I hoped to take, I met up with an advisor who had selected for me the time slots so that there are no conflicts. The nice thing about this was that I did not have to look myself for sections that matched up in order to avoid signing up for classes that had conflicting times. The not so nice part is that I have no control over the times or days during the week of my courses.
But that in itself was already a given. Why? We were told, when getting our schedules, that we needed to check the website constantly, every week, in order to make sure that our class time and place had not changed. So I currently have a class on Mondays from 1:40pm until 3:10pm in building A, room 101. At any point, this can change to a different time on a different day in a different room of a different building. I was pretty baffled when I found this out. If you don’t already know, I am a huge planner and anyone that has had a class with me or knows me well can attest to this. I love my planners, my weekly reminders on my computer, my calendars, etc. etc. And now, I can’t even plan when my classes will be in a couple of weeks, much less the rest of the semester! I’m just not used to it and I crave structure too much in my life. But it’s nothing I can’t handle, it’s just different. I definitely have found myself to be very thankful for the structure we have at Santa Clara, though, when it comes to course selection and obtaining (solidified and unchanging) class schedules.
This does sound stressful! Yikes! Make sure you make a daily planner instead of a weekly one.
ReplyDeleteNo, I did not do the mind thing to Matt Parkman, but the cook I work with did. Matt Parkman laughed, and I got jealous. Then Parkman read my mind, and then all of a sudden I was trapped by some brick wall. I just got out.
Furthermore, I found out that a Heroes movie is not in the works yet, but it remains a hot topic. So Heroes is out of our foreseeable future.