The moment you've all been waiting for

Here it is, another epically long post catching you up on roughly the past week of my Parisian life:

Let's start with last Tuesday, which was a day of major changes. First, Tuesday had the distinction of being the day that we could register for classes. All day Monday we had orientation sessions that were supposed to prepare us for that fateful moment, but turned out to do nothing of the sort. We spent six hours in a giant lecture hall with 700 other international students listening to presentations in English and French (sometimes the same presentation given in one language and then the other, which was rough for those of us who understand both langauges...). Also, this lecture hall was probably built in about 1940 and was therefore not comfortable at all. At any rate, we went into the registration process a little confused, but mostly feeling like we knew what was going on. How foolish that seems now....

So we all have extensive lists of courses we are willing to take because they told us to be prepared with multiple back ups, but it's a nightmare to coordinate the times of your back ups with your first choices and with each other, so we were all really just hoping we'd be able to get on and register for everything we wanted. That was not to be. We struggled with the online registration process, continually getting error messages for about 45 minutes without figuring out what we were doing wrong. Jim was on hold for at least 30 of those minutes trying to talk to tech support. We finally got it worked out (we hadn't selected something that they never told us we had to select if that makes any sense). So by the time we could actually sign up for classes, almost all of the electives were full and the timing of discussion sections was getting worse by the minute (we're talking 5:00pm Friday, here people - or actually, 17:00).

However, by some miracle, I've actually ended up with a decent course schedule! All of my classes are in French (I'm now wishing I were taking an English elective, but we'll see how this works out...). I have two large lecture courses (cours magistraux). Each one of those has a discussion section associated with it (a conférence) with about 20 students in it. Then I have two elective courses (which are both small, under 25 students, I think) and one French language course.

My cours magistraux are (translated to English): Contemporary French Political Life and the other one is literally called Global Space. I'm struggling to come up with a better translation of this course title, but basically it's a multidisciplinary approach to globalization - through history, economics, political science, geography, and athropology. It's the largest course offered at Sciences Po, and it's also an "e Cours" which means I can watch lectures online and such, but I'll tell you more about that once I'm actually using those features.

My electives are a little more fun because they're more specific. First, I'm taking a course called Architecture and Urbanism. I'm hoping to have it count for my Fine Art requirement at ND, but that's by no means a sure thing. At the very least, I'll having things to talk about with my ND Architecture friends when I see them in Rome!!

And finally, the class I'm most excited for : History of the Environment from the 17th to the 20th Century. I have high hopes for this class. :)

Of all of these courses only that last one was in my "ideal schedule" but the others all made my list of possibilities, so I didn't do too badly. I also didn't do too badly on the timing of my courses - I have no classes on Tuesday and no classes on Friday!! I only have one on Thursday, and it's from 8:00-10:00AM, which will be a struggle for me to make it to, but that means I can leave for weekend trips by about noon on Thursday, which will really make the travel costs of a weekend trip seem much more worthwhile.

That's all I have in me for now- I need to sleep and try to figure out some issue with my orientation class schedule, so information on the Welcome Program will have to wait.

À très bien tôt !