School Life in London

Since my post yesterday was about what living in London is like (so far), I figured I would do a post on what its like going to school in London. Its a lot different in various ways then I had pictured. I am currently enrolled in 4 classes: Foundation of Christianity, Revolutions in Thought (ethics course), Romantic Revolutions (english course), and Jim Crow America (don't laugh, no other history course would fit so I'm taking an American one). I decided the easiest way to describe this to you would be to break it down into various sections.

Majors

Here, your major is referred to as your course (and classes are called modules). There aren't very many modules at the school I am attending, but the biggest ones are history, drama, and education. There are no science majors here, which is why I am taking a variety of classes to finish off my general education requirement. From what I have heard from some of the British & Irish students at the university, there aren't that many schools with science majors. For many students I was one of the first science majors they ever met. 

Students here also only take the classes they need for their major. There are no general education requirements like we have back at home. Because of this, all the classes I am enrolled in are full of students who are majoring in this topic. Back at HPU you always had  other people in the class that didn't really know about the class topic, whereas here I am the only person in the class that doesn't know the topic nor interested in it for the most part. For example, in my second religion class we were having a class discussion on the Didache and there were students in the class starting shouting out bible versus that the passage reminded them of. I was way out of my comfort zone. 

Schedules

Get ready for your brain to be blown for this one. Classes here only meet once a week for about 2 hours. period. You can do the math on that one, 4 classes x 2 hours = 8 hours total in class. One of my chemistry labs last semester was 6 hours alone!! Scheduling here is also nice because you can plan out your free time easily, and as an international student it gives Kevin & I lots of time to go out and see things. I was able to work my schedule so that I only have classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday giving myself a 4 day weekend every weekend!

However, scheduling is a bit more difficult here for international students. Because the full-time year round students here don't have to take gen. ed classes like we do, the faculty in each major makes a schedule to fit the needs of their students. Because they don't have to provide numerous sections for each class, most classes only have 1 time slot. This causes a problem for international students sometimes because they are enrolling into classes of various topics, and because each departments faculty don't work with one another, it was hard to find classes that didn't overlap with one another. This is part of the reason why I am enrolled in the American History class (and because I didn't want a class on Friday). Hopefully that made sense haha.

Assignments

Personally, this was the biggest shock of them all. I am use to having lots of reading, with lots of homework, and test frequently. Here, however, there are no test and no homework sets (at least in none of my classes or any of my friends' classes). There is a fare bit of reading for each class, but its no more than I was already doing back at home. Instead, each of my classes have 2 essays as the grading assignment. Normally, this would make me freak out because I am not a writer, but each of my teachers have told us that they would review our essays and work with us on them if we needed help (I don't know about everyone else, but none of my teachers at home ever offered that much help for an essay... but then again I have only written a few since college began). Its been a bit of a shock not having much work, because I am normally filled with task & assignments to work through whereas here, I can do almost all my work in one sitting. 

Grades

Here is another mind blower. Passing a class at St. Mary's only requires you to get above a 40%. I kid you not. 

also sidenote, this is what public sinks look like in England.

I am not entirely sure how to actually work it just yet, but the hot handle is on the left and the cold handle is on the right. I'm not sure why they are separate, but thats how they are here. They also have a drain plug, which again I don't know why.