I have my schedule!

On Monday, August 18th I had my first day of class at La Catolica. The entire week we were able to "probar"(sample) which ever classes we wanted and by Friday had to hand in our final classes to the international office. All of this sounds pretty simple but FALSE last week was awful. I probably went to 10 different classes, some I couldn't understand the professors, some I couldn't understand the content, and others had debates and oral final exams which I want nothing to do with. Everyday I came home more frustrated than the day before and had to spend hours online making up new schedules knowing that next day I would most likely have to change everything again. By Thursday night I thought I had my schedule all set when I got an email from the international office saying that we were not guaranteed any of these classes and we had to attend a mandatory matriculation on Monday. On Monday I got up really early to be at the matriculation an hour early because it was on a first come, first serve basis. They never told us how many spots were available in the classes, how many international students would be in each class or really anything other than to just show up on Monday. Everyone, me included, was really worried we wouldn't get the classes we wanted. I ended up getting the classes that I wanted; Spanish Linguistics, Contemporary Spanish Literature, and Peruvian History. My schedule is terrible though; three days of the week I have one morning class and the other two I have one class in the morning and one at night. I'm going to have to go back and forth to Catolica a lot more than I had planned and now I won’t be able to travel so much on the weekends. Hopefully though all of these classes will transfer back to Madison and I will only have a few classes left for my major when I get back. We don’t need to buy a lot of books for classes here because most things are photocopied. There is a photocopy location in each faculty and you have to go buy the copies for class. It’s kind of like a course packet at UW except not bound. It’s really cheap though, it cost me 13/$4 soles for all the info for my literature class and it’s probably a couple hundred pages. For that class I did have to buy the book "Cien anos de soledad" which cost about 30 soles/$10.

Culture note: People here don’t wait in "line" here. There is no such thing as a line, getting the photo copies was really hard because people just yell over you what they need and just bunch up around the counter.