School has begun!

The summer semester officially began this past Monday here in Oldenburg. With that said, this week (and the preceding days) proved to be some of the most stressful, but let me start from the beginning. The process of course registration for international students is very different than UW registration process..or of any others that I have heard of. The exchange students were told during orientation week that we do actually register for classes in any formal sense of the word "register". We needed only to attend the class we desired. However, finding the classes offered was also a challenge. We had to navigate through a maze-like website to finally end up at a seemingly random list of departments. From there, you choose a Fach and scroll through a list of classes offered. Furthermore, the class structure is (of course) very different than what I have ever seen. There are various "module" were there are a list of classes belonging to different categories...Seminar, Vorlesung, und Uebung. When I was initially looking through these classes, I really had no clue what these categories meant. I soon found out (after several different people explaining it to me) that a Seminar is a normal class which is usually smaller, a Vorlesung is a lecture with a large amount of people, and an Uebung is somewhat like a lab class in which you have practical practice. From there, I discovered that you must take the Seminar and whichever Uebung or Vorlesung is listed with it (which both may be). Even later, I discovered that as Exchange student, I don't really need to take both...(yes, I know, this is extremely confusing). Also as an exchange student, I can attend as many classes as I want, and drop the ones I don't want up until the final with no consequences. So while looking through these classes, I realized that each class is only offered once a week for two hours (quite a bit longer than our little 50 lectures at UW). To further the frustration, the foreign exchange student's German placement test, which would tell us which level of German we would be taking, was not until this Wednesday. So while trying to put together a schedule, I had to work around the idea that my 6 hour German course could be anytime during the week.

So finally on Monday, I had somewhat of a list of classes which I would like to try. After my first class, at 8 am Monday morning, I realized that this may be a little more difficult than originally thought (I am not quite sure why I though taking college level Deutsch courses would be remotely easy or possible...). After sitting through two hours (well an hour and a half since, although it says the class starts at 8, German classes actually start 15 minutes after the start time and end 15 minutes before the end time), I walked up to the teacher, with a slue of other exchange students, to discuss if we would be able to stay in the course. Then it was off to my next class, which followed the same pattern. In all I attended about 6 or 7 classes...2 of which I will be returning. The week was far from relaxing in any sense. However, now, I have a pretty clear idea of what I will be taking, I know what German language class I will be in, and I am quite happy with my schedule (Friday's off!). And on top of that the weather has been stunning with temperatures in the 70s and the sun making regular appearances all week. Now it Easter weekend and I know many exciting things are in store for my future.