Registration Week!

On Monday, registration began. In the morning, I met with the other students in my program for the first time! There are 29 of us from 12 different countries, including: Uganda, Pakistan, United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Barbados, Egypt, South Africa, Cyprus, France, Ireland, and China. I am one of the youngest of course. Most of my classmates have several years work experience, but I am excited to learn from them!

After we were welcomed by the professors for Engineering for Sustainable Development (there are three of them), we met up with all the engineering graduate students for a welcome talk from the Engineering Department. Then we headed upstairs to complete are computer registration. Monday night was also Curry Night at my college. All the graduate students met up in the MCR (middle common room) to enjoy some curry which was delivered by a local restaurant. The curry was delicious, cheap (2 pounds), and the conversation was even better!

On Tuesday, all graduate students had a 2 hour long safety talk from the University (boring, but useful and necessary). Tuesday afternoon we had more talks about computing and then were introduced to one of the courses in our program (MoTI, Management of Technology and Innovation). MoTI is taught by the Judge Business School and is basically like getting a mini MBA within our program. We have to choose 4 of the 7 classes to take. I will be taking Microeconomics, Decision Theory, Accounting and Finance, and Marketing. Tuesday was also the day of the University Society Fair: it was crazy! Imagine hundreds of societies, clubs, and teams on everything you can imagine crammed into two gyms. Plus, everyone was trying to convince you to join their club with free stuff. I joined a wine tasting club, Engineers without Borders, Scuba Diving, Caving, a drama society, an Arabic club, fencing, and tennis. Some of those I wanted to sign up for and some I got tricked into. I came away with a 1GB flash drive, a T-shirt, 3 bags, a can of baked beans, a deck of cards, a lot of candy, and a bunch of other junk.

So, now would be a good time to update you on rowing and my other sportscapades. Well, I definitely am no longer rowing for the University (I was actually able to tell them no!), but I am still pursuing rowing for my college. We had our first practice this morning and it went better than I expected. It looks like I will be stroking! The level is nowhere near the University level, but we have all year to improve. However, I will still be competing on a University team! I signed up for University Tennis (I haven't played in 4 years, but I took it pretty seriously in high school), but then realized I wouldn't be able to make the tryouts so I contacted the Captain. She set up for me to have a private tryout yesterday with the best player on the team, Victoria. Victoria just got back from playing in a tour of famous tennis clubs in the US! Needless to say she was very good, but I held my own. At the end of the session, she said she was shocked at how good I was for not having played in 4 years and said I might have a chance at making the first team (8 girls) or I would be at the top of the second team. So that's where things stand at the moment: on to the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, we had another introductory talk about my program, Engineering for Sustainable Development. That's when we learned what classes we will be taking. This term, in addition to the 4 MoTI courses I already mentioned, I will be taking Sustainable Development Contexts, Environment Economic and Community Perspectives, Electricity and Environment, Management of Technology, a Discussion Seminar, and a Research Skills course. I know, that's a lot of courses (10), I'm a little worried to say the least.

Tomorrow my program is headed off for a field course in Stonehenge! On the trip we will visit four sites to study roads and their effects on landscapes (a major highway is located just 200m from Stonehenge). Besides Stonehenge, I am very excited about our first stop, Beaufort Court (the old Ovaltine Egg Farm). The building has been fully converted to a Zero Emissions Building, which produces all its energy on-site from renewable sources. The site includes a wind turbine, solar panel array, biomass crop, ground water cooling, and an underground heat store.

So that's it for registration week. I can't wait to upload photos of Stonehenge and tell you about my first week of classes!