First day of classes down

Man, I’m freaking tired. Listening to German lectures fries yer brain hardcore.

I got up early this morning to meet with a professor from my department. Good old Dr. Schulz was appointed as Foreign Students Adviser, so over the weekend he shot the lot of us Electrical Engineering and Information Technology majors who are not from around these parts an e-mail, saying that we should meet him at his office at 8:30am today. Which we did.

The meeting was informative, I suppose, but pretty rudimentary. All we really learned was that classes started today, and that we should have picked out our courses by now, in order to attend the ones we wished. Well, duh. But to be honest, I actually hadn’t really done all that dirty work. Things work funny here: one doesn’t register for classes. That’s right. You don’t register for classes. Instead, you just go to whichever classes you feel like, and when exam time rolls around in January, you have to sign up to take the exams of the classes you wish to receive credit for.

It is still, of course, important to attend classes from the outset, so as not to fall behind. That much I knew. And that’s why immediately after meeting with Dr. Schulz, I rushed home to scour the FHM website for classes I could take. I’d done all this back in the spring, negotiating with Drexel for equivalency credit on some classes, but spring is way back there, obscured by memories of Oktoberfest, which have since taken precedence in recall in my brain.

I picked out two excellent classes for today, and went to both: “Operating Systems I” and “Communication Systems I.” The former is listed in the Computer Science department, the latter in EE&IT. Both classes were taught in German, which made for absolutely unbearable lecture periods. The subject matter really is fascinating to me, but man, I’ve never had to listen to German for three straight hours, like I did today in CommSys. This is going to be a long semester!

I still have not finalized my schedule, as all of the best courses are cross-scheduled with one another. Go figure. I haven’t seen a single course offered on Fridays, which is a very good sign. I’m pretty sure I’ll keep the two courses I went to today, although snaking in other courses around them might prove difficult. Yet I shall prevail. Now the issue is deciding between things like “Algorithms and Data Structures” and “Software Development,” or “Computer Networks” and “Programming.” Decisions, decisions. And if I can convince myself to drop Software Development, then I could take “Looking at e-society from an international perspective”!

I’ll post a full schedule when I’ve made one I’m reasonably happy with.