Great start

After a great night, but too little sleep, I woke up to go to my very first lecture today. A tiny bit sleepy, but with a healthy dose of curiosity I went to what was meant to be my first class in marketing communication.

After half an hour, there was still no sign of a lecturer and even taking into account possible cultural differences, that is just plain rude. As it turned out that after all the infosessions on safety and transport, they forgot to mention that we have a blackboard just like back home. Course information and announcements can be found there, including the announcement that my first lecture was actually cancelled. Great. I could have stayed in bed.

I found out all about the blackboard pages with three German girls and we spent the rest of the lecture time in a computerlab looking through the course info. For the interface I wrote an article on plagiarism and how they deal with it at the Erasmus, so I found it very interesting that when I opened blackboard for the first time, there were big red letters stating I hadn't done the academic honesty test yet. When I browsed through my course descriptions, this test was also mentioned. If I didn't get 80% or higher for this test, I would not get a pass for my subjects. In the end I first had to watch an interactive film on the topic of paraphrasing etc. before I could get to the second step. This included three topics, each with a text to read and a test I had to fill out compeltely correct before I could see the next topic. After this came the test itself, containing twenty obvious questions such as 'I paraphrased the paragraph, so I do not have to worry about referencing'. I can now say I am academically honest, woohoo.

Something postive I found out was that I only have to buy books for two out of four courses. The other two are just articles online. At 11.30 we went to the free tea and cakes organised each week by Unimates and just chatted with some other people.

Right now I am still not sure what I will do tonight, as I am a bit tired and I do have an offer to go eat out at a thai place (but as I have never really learned to eat spicy food, I don't think that's a very good idea). One thing is for sure, even though I still have the feeling I am still on a holiday and resits of second year aren't even over, I have started my third year and actually have homework to do.