Trials and Tribulations

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What a week. After spending all of September and half of October meeting people, exploring the city and having fun, I almost forgot that I had to take some classes. Unfortunately that turned out to be a lot easier said than done.

I'll try to make a laundry list of things I don't like about the system/bureaucracy for choosing classes at TU Berlin, but I have plenty to say about it. First of all, there actually IS no enrollment process. You just show up the first day of class and hope there's enough room for you. Knowing that, the logical thing to do would be to look at the online course catalog (Vorlesungsverzeichnis--a word I've come to absolutely hate) and pick out a bunch of classes that interest you. But...you have to dive through multiple levels of hierarchy to (school, department, etc.) before you actually find any classes. And there are no prerequisites for anything, so there's no telling if you're prepared for a class or not. Anyway, once you manage that step, you should be able to show up on the first day, right? Well, not if the professor doesn't feel like it. And if a class is listed as being in English, it should be in English, right? Nah. And even if your French class is too easy, forget about moving up to the next level, because all those classes were booked up two weeks ago. UNbelievable.

So after two weeks of trying to deal with all this, I wound up with what I thought were too few courses for me to even be considered a full-time student anymore. The last class I went to, Industrial Culture in the Ruhrgebiet, went like this: the professor had nothing to say about the structure of the class. She just jumped right into a long-winded introduction to the Ruhrgebiet which I couldn't really understand, because she was speaking really quietly in heavily accented German. Then, all of a sudden, she passes around a paper and asks us to write down what we want to do a presentation over. Obviously, this wasn't for me. Then it rained on me throughout my 15 minute walk home. With this in mind, I called home. Not exactly the independent spirit I was hoping to maintain, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. Anyway, Mom helped me calm down a little bit, and then I called the Education Abroad office at OU to try and straighten things out. In no mood to be put on hold, I just told the secretary, "I'm an exchange student in Germany, and I have a crisis." Then she put me through to the director, and we eventually fixed the issue. Turns out the classes I did manage to find and keep will be enough for this semester. Whewwww

So, mentioning that, the classes I'm taking are: German as a Foreign Language (Deutsch als Fremdsprache), Living Electronic Music (in English), Organising Electronic Music (also in English), and Bauhaus Revisited (in German). The electronic music classes should fulfill a general education requirement back at OU, and the Bauhaus class just seemed interesting. There are a lot of architecture students here; I think that's this school's specialty.

Well I think this post turned into a rant after all, but not every experience here can be positive, I guess. In any case--auf jeden Fall--I've put this one behind me for the time being.

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