Wednesday, January 22, 2014

First Class Completed!

I must say that going to school at GEM is completely different then anything I have ever experienced before. I have as of Monday completed one of my courses here, Business Development in Emerging Economies (apart from the 2,000 word paper due in 2 weeks I need to write). I really enjoyed the professor a lot, but the material itself wasn't of huge interest to me. For this class we had to complete "15 contact hours." This basically means that the course could be completely extremely quickly. Unfortunately, I have never been prepared for this type of learning environment, and I am learning that others have not either. The 3 hour sessions of the same class and same professor can get tiring very quickly. Even worse, is that next monday I will get to start a new topic with a new professor from 8-6 PM with short breaks throughout the day. I really don't know how I will make it through.

On a more positive note, I started my French class yesterday. I absolutely love it! I definitely think it will be my favorite class. The professor is very nice and helpful. We often would get off on tangents and she would answer all of our questions. We learned some basic questions/responses and phrases. We will be meeting every week for 3 contact hours and also are required to complete out of class learning exercises as well. One of the options is to meet one-on-one with a tutor for 30 minutes to work on anything that we may want to improve on. I think that this exercise will be my most useful tool to improve my French. I have continued practicing with Rosetta Stone, but it is nice to have feedback on my pronunciation. I think that with the combination of the two I will be able to learn the language much quicker.

As for the rest of my week it wasn't too eventful. I had a class presentation on Monday, so I spent some of the weekend working on that as well as starting to panic a little about being away from home. Fortunately with the internet and technology we have now I was able to talk to my parents and some friends and they helped me think more positively about my whole experience. Over the weekend I had a wine and cheese night with Rohit and we watched a movie. On Saturday morning I went with Lucy to go grocery shopping. We took her suitcase so we could carry more back, which was really nice.

Yesterday after I got out of my French class Isabelle and I went to Le France where they only serve beverages. We got coffee and wine and had a really nice time hanging out. She had a presentation to give today so she practiced and I gave her some advice to improve. I tried to get some reading done for my law class tomorrow but we mostly talked. We made a plan to cook dinner and drink wine Thursday night at her apartment. This coming weekend I will be going to Lyon with a group of 8 girls to explore. I am really looking forward to that. I think it will be a great weekend. Unfortunately I didn't have the most thrilling week so I wanted to wait until I had more to write about before posting a new entry. This afternoon will consist of a visit to the bank and hopefully a walk up to la Bastille. It is a beautiful day. I hope I left myself enough time to fit everything in!

Au Revoir!




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