School, Week 1

Okay, so I haven't written in the last week. I was trying to come up with something interesting to write. Since I failed to come up with anything, I'll just write a lame blog post like I always do. It doesn't seem that anyone ever really minds. (Though it also doesn't seem that a lot of people read this anymore. I miss when I used to get comments. What ever happened to that?)

Okay, let's see. Monday was my first day of introduction, followed by Tuesday and Wednesday. Of course my roommates started Wednesday and then had things all day Thursday and Friday. But we all start classes on September 10th so I guess we do come together at some point.

They kind of split us off into our classes. but then apparently they didn't like the way they arranged the classes and they intend to change it, so the people that we've been getting to know this week won't be our classmates after all.  I guess that's fine.  I haven't really made any friends yet.  There is one English girl who it turns out shares the back courtyard with me, she lives in one of the apartments one street over. We've been talking a bit, I guess.  The rest of my class is Dutch (mostly girls) and they of course stick to speaking Dutch whenever they possibly can, so it kind of automatically excludes Jessie (the English girl) and me.

Aside from the fact that they intend to switch around the classes, I'm trying to see if my high school diploma is good enough for me to move to the three year track instead of the four year track. I would love to be able to graduate in three years rather than four, it would be much cheaper and well obviously, take less time. I talked to someone in the European Studies office and she said she would put in a request to the enrollment center to re-examine my high school diploma and see if I qualify to switch. I'm not entirely sure what would qualify someone to switch. I'm wondering if my diploma has to be vwo-equivalent, in which case I have no idea if they will approve me. I'm sure the college courses I took in high school will definitely help, plus the fact that I maintained good grades throughout high school...  Fingers crossed. I really want to be switched over.

So if I switch to the three year track it means I have to pick my specialization after the first year instead of after the second year (either private sector or public sector. I don't know what to choose yet).  It also means that the optional study abroad year is second year rather than third year (only optional for international students, mandatory for Dutch students). I have to decide whether or not I want to do it, it might be good for me and you never know, it could end up being relatively cheap or at least equivalent costs to what I'm already paying to live and attend school here.  The three year track just moves a bit faster than the four year track, apparently they try to cram as much information as they can into your first year so that the next two years move at about the same pace as the last two years for four year students. Confusing.

I know a lot of people probably want to know what "European Studies" even is. The biggest focus is on languages. After that, it's a lot of division between learning about European economics, politics, culture, etc. Maybe not the most exciting thing, but it will definitely be far more useful to me than just studying every little aspect of the French language (and little else) in the U.S. would have been.  Plus this program allows you to study multiple languages at once, so I can take advanced French, beginning Dutch, and another language on which I have yet to decide. More than likely it will be Spanish (and they don't let you do two advanced languages at once so I'd have to start at the beginning) because I don't think there is any other option but if they switch me to the three year track I'll have to find out, because then I'll have to start that second choice right away (in the four year track you don't start the second language until the second year). Someone mentioned Mandarin and Russian...

The beginning Dutch course is only available the first semester unfortunately. I guess after that they expect you to have learned enough to just get by and you don't need any more. Dutch is a difficult language and it's not widely used, so I can understand why they would think you don't need to learn much of it. It doesn't matter, I still want to learn to speak it more than just one semester will give me. I'm good at absorbing and self-teaching though, so I think after a semester I'll have a good enough head start to continue on my own.

It's the last day of August; I'm sitting on the balcony and my feet are freezing and my arms are freezing, though I'm wearing a jacket; the sun is out and the sky is a pretty blue. Yes, it's fairly cold here but I enjoy it. The university has this international student organization called InterAccess and they're doing an Amsterdam trip some time next week, I may or may not go depending on if I'm feeling up to it. I haven't decided.

And... I think tonight for dinner I will make pasta. With broccoli and onion. And cheese. Yep, sounds good to me.