Classes Commence

This post will describe my first few days at uni. It was interesting enough to outline on this memorial medium. A tail of surprise, tragedy and triumph will be detailed below. (not sure why I'm talking/writing like this) As always, read on for your pleasure...

February 27th was a Wednesday and it was the first day of uni (short for university here in Australia and some other countries around the world) at QUT. It started off with me acting like a freshmen the first morning before heading to high-school. I was excited about meeting new people and wanted to make a good impression. That means that you need to look good, so I spent a bit of time figuring out what I was going to wear. After realizing how ridiculous that was, I went for the most obvious attire that pointed to the fact that I was new. That would be the free t-shirt that all first-year students got. Because that took a while, I was a bit late leaving home. Oh well, off I went with my empty book-bag and awesome new camera.

      

The walk to QUT is beautiful. It is it a combination of modern flower-covered structures, lily pad filled ponds, green parklands, unusual birds, along with the picturesque views of the Brisbane River and cityscape. Although I was a bit late in regards to getting along to class on time, I stopped to take quite a bit of photos of the journey. 


Once across to the Gardens Point (GP) campus of QUT, I had a look at my schedule to figure out where my classes where. It would just be my awesome luck that my first class was in the state of the art Science and Engineering P block that was just completed in February of 2013. The building is beyond belief in design and quality. My first class was Australian Culture and Society lecture at 12:00PM. I walked in a bit late, but no worries mate. Landon and Emily (both from USC) are also in that class, and I sat beside them. The lecturer/professor was cool. He jokes a bit and generally wants students to learn AND enjoy his class. As he has many international students take his course who don't speak English as their first language, he's going to curve the grades slightly. I have the tutorial for that class afterwards which can be thought of as a recitation. After that I have a Management tutorial followed by the lecture which ends at 8:00PM. To my Surprise, my friend Allie from Arizona is also in that class so we walked back to urbanest together.

Thursday was kinda funny to me. I needed a history unit, so I signed up for Modern China which is on the Kelvin Grove (KG) campus of QUT. I'd say it was probably a 20 minute bus ride from my apartment. I had never visited that campus before, so I should have left a bit earlier. I didn't because I had a quick Skype with a friend back home. Tragic... When I off the bus I was already 10 minutes late to class. Crap... It turned into the same day as Wednesday. I just took more pictures of my journey to class. I got to class at about 2:35PM when class started at 2:00PM (don't judge). When I walked in, there were Chinese characters written on the white board and talks about the geography of China. Although it seemed interesting enough on paper, I knew that it wasn't going to work and felt like I was already to far behind. In order to solve that, kindly grabbing my belongings I headed to GP to drop the class. I sat beside a cutie pie, so I said my goodbyes as I walked out. Damn... Later I had both a lecture and tutorial for Consumer Behavior at GP. I made it on time and the class was awesome. Probably going to be my favorite classes here and one of my favorites during my college career. I met some guys from New York during orientation last week, and one of them is in that class with me.

That ended my classes for the first week. Check out the post to be titled "I Love GOLD" for the weekend coming soon. Take a reading break for a moment....almost done?? Now there just two more paragraphs to go.

Monday morning I had to go to another lecture and tutorial, Interpreting the Past. It was the class that I added when I dropped Modern China. The reason why I picked it up is because the synopsis sounded interesting enough and the lecturer/professor was the same as the my Australian Culture and Society. That means that not only was it going to be interesting, but it was going to be fairly easy. Again, I was late to class (it's my thing). When I finally made it to class after finding and stoping at the library so that I could print off the lecture notes, I walked into a very dark room with blue light glow at the front of lecture hall and a projection of Animal Farm. I couldn't see any open seats because it was too dark, so I just walked up the middle of the stairs until this girl moved her book bag signaling that there was an open seat. We watched the entire movie. When it ended to guy next to me had that "I just woke up" face. I called him out. Turns out his name is Conner from Australia and he had the same tutorial as me. In the tutorial we watched another video. This time it was a documentary about Anastasia. I think I made the right choice in this class. Triumph... Before heading to work, I stopped for lunch. Who was two people in front of me? Aaron! Part of my urbanest fam. 

Overall, I'm looking forward to my schedule. I have a pal in each class and I'm looking forward to meeting more folks. My lecturers are all interesting and I think I'm going to enjoy the semester at QUT. Especially because I only have to get a 4 out of 7 to pass the class. As I often think,

"THIS CAN'T BE REAL LIFE!"

Until next time,

Kyron S. Whitfield