First Day Of School!

After days of scheduling classes, looking up timetables, and frantically running around our huge campus trying to find buildings, our first day of classes is finally here! I feel like I did when I was a kid on the first day of school, all giddy and excited but pretty nervous. I am currently sitting in the Engineering building (right up my alley, I know) getting lunch and hanging out for a couple hours until my first class at three.
Alli and I walked to campus around 12:30 so that we could try to sign up for a sociology seminar. Each seminar can only take around six international students so we got there early. To our surprise, there were already 40-50 students waiting in a hallway! We sat down somewhat in the middle of the crowd and patiently waited outside of a classroom until one when the professor arrived. He approached us and explained that he would put a desk out and then it would be a first-come first-serve system in putting our seminar application sheets down on the desk. I've never seen so many intense sociology students! It was a mad dash to try to put our sheets on the desk first but luckily, Alli and I happened to be sitting right next to the room so we got our sheets down pretty quickly. Hopefully we'll find out if we got in to a seminar soon!

Classes here seem very different from how they are back home. First of all, classes never start right on the hour. It is common for class to start 10-15 minutes late, and apparently you never want to be the first one to class. All of my classes meet once or twice a week for one or two hours so I only have about 12 hours of class per week! Somehow I worked out my schedule so that I am free on Fridays so now I will be able to travel more on weekends which is nice. All of the Irish students go home on the weekends and it gets pretty dead around campus anyway.
I'm taking Celtic Languages in the Modern World, Intro to Practical Ethics, European Women Studies, Drama & Theater Studies, History of Modern Philosophy, and either a music, service, or sociology seminar class. I'm hoping that I get into Service Literacy and Learning in the Community because we would get to volunteer and help young Irish children with their homework! However, there are only about 30 spots and I think a lot more than that applied. I'll blog about it if I get in, though!

Tonight should be fun - there is a welcome dinner with our Arcadia program tonight to check in with everyone and then apparently everyone is hitting the town because all the students are back! I can't wait to meet more Irish students.. I met 2/3 of my roommates last night, Sharon and Rachel, and they are lovely! They seemed very excited to meet us and I think they will be great people to live with.

I'll write again soon, thanks for reading!!

Maggie