Let the Academics begin.

So Kenny and Sam (two of the guys in our program) are pretty much my heroes right now. Their roommate is a senior here at Cork and he taught them how to turn the heaters on in the rooms and they came up to our floor and showed us what to do. I’m not going to lie I am so happy right now that there is heat. It isn’t extremely hot in the rooms but it’s warm enough to get rid of the chills from being outside.

Today we have orientation with the university and we’re supposed to be picking our classes at some point. We go for about 4 hours straight before they kind of just let us go do our own thing and tour the campus and everything. What I’m really looking forward to is coming back to my room and actually finding a place for everything to go. That’s always the hardest part about moving into a new room. Especially for me because after the first couple of days things will just end up in piles on my desk and they’ll stay there for a few weeks before I put them all away. Then it all just ends up right back on the desk. It sounds messy but in all honesty I’m a fairly organized person. I always know what’s what and where things are in the middle of the mess, so it works. 

The weird thing about their school system is that we have a 2 week trial period where we can basically just go try any of the classes that we want and by the end of the 2 weeks we just say which classes we want to take. At UConn we have a couple of weeks to swap classes if we want to but we don’t really get to try them out before hand. Their grading system is also really different, which you can expect, different schools do it all differently. This is REALLY different. In the US a 65 is considered a D, while here it’s considered an A-. How that works, I’m really not sure but I guarantee that the first few assignments I get back are going to drive me crazy with the number scores I may get on them. Well for now it’s off to orientation.

Orientation was so disorienting. Four hours later and I felt so much more confused about everything that they went over with us. Granted there are 20 of us in our group and we were able to figure things out. I finally have wireless in my room after trying to figure out how that worked for 2 days. I’ve picked classes and it’s pretty wonderful how it all worked out. I have classes Monday to Wednesday and then a four day weekend. I’m taking literature and modern Ireland, 18^th century literature, introduction to classical Irish music, Education and welfare, Gaelic, and, unfortunately, Shakespeare. I tried so hard to stay away from taking the Shakespeare class, but when I found out that the other options I had for English classes overlapped each other in some way I gave in and just signed up for it. Don’t get me wrong, I like Shakespeare, but after an entire semester of having a teacher who did nothing but make comparisons to Shakespeare I really just needed a mental break from him.

As far as classes and everything go, it’s all finally done being dealt with and I won’t have a class till next Monday, but that’s okay with me. Well I’ve got to run, our group is going out together tonight.

With Love Always