Two Weeks

Yes, all you people coming back  from October break to begin classes anew, I, though I’ve mentioned the Summer Uni and Preparatory classes in earlier posts, have only just finished my second week of actual German University classes. I haven’t really said anything worthwhile yet, mostly because I still have the problem where I understand what is said and formulate a response about a minute slower than everyone else in the class.

The class culture here is completely different from at Holy Cross, in just about every way that matters. First, the system to choose classes and the website where course descriptions are written are not the same, so lots of back and forth between the two is necessary to make sure you are enrolling in the class you actually want. The levels of courses are also not easily explained by numbers; lowest to highest means easiest to hardest. Instead, they just have the title, Lecture, Seminar (and there are usually 3 different kinds of these), and Tutorial. It’s also encouraged to take the same class subject at more than one of these levels. For example, several other students and I are taking both the Lecture and Seminar for Frederick Barbarossa II. Now that I’ve finally mentioned the students, there are a heck of a lot more of them in each class than at Holy Cross. The seminars have about 30 people each, which I don’t think any class at Holy Cross, that I have taken so far, had. The Lecture had about 100, from my estimate, but just to give a sense of scale, the “room” for the class is actually three rooms with the partitions taken down.

The professors also have much less oversight concerning their students’ work, since the only things that are required for the class are what counts for ECTS credits (the EUs system for transferring University credits between schools/countries), which is always only a combination of a presentation, and final exam, and/or a term paper. Otherwise no other homework is given out. Sometimes, the professor doesn’t even hand out “assigned readings” and instead just puts up a massive list of related literature on the Virtual Campus website (kind of like Moodle, not related to the other two website mentioned), and sort of says, “Have fun reading”. In the spirit of keeping this concise, I’ll leave you with a final thought; the term papers are typically due the day the next semester begins, not when the current semester ends.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2014 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.