Classes, or lack of...

Uppsala University has a very different system than UVic. At UVic, you have a fixed set of classes for three months and then an exam period. Week to week is exactly the same and your four or five courses last for the duration of this period. At Uppsala, you generally take one or two courses at a time and then they finish after five or so weeks.

In August I took a five week Swedish language course. I had class for three hours Mon-Fri. This was very similar to UVic; however, it appears to have been an exception at Uppsala.

At the beginning of September I started a Swedish history class after finishing the language course. Each lecture was two hours long. The first two weeks I had two lectures, the third week I had three lectures, and then I had two weeks to write a 12-page paper. That was all there was for the class. And it was a full course load. Also, every lecture was in a different classroom, had a different teacher, and was at a different time. (Luckily, the day that I showed up at the wrong time, I was an hour early.) We were supposed to also have a final exam but our teacher decided against that because he didn't want to mark that many exams. (Apparently we had a large class at 25 students.) This structure of changing time and a lot of independent study seems to be the norm.

I've started a new course called What Happened to the Novel? We're comparing the movie adaptions of the books "Frankenstein" and "The Scarlet Letter". Last week we had one class. It was a two hour introduction were we talked (7 students and 2 teachers) about our thoughts on movie adaptions. We have a bunch of small writing assignments (one to two pages each) and then a final presentation. This week, I have two small writing assignments (900 words total). As well, I need to read "Frankenstein" and get together with three other students and talk about the book. We got together in a coffee shop and discussed the book while having fika. Next week we're watching the movie on Mon and then discussing it on Wed. This isn't quite a full course load because I couldn't get my schedule to work out so in a few weeks I'll have several weeks of over 100% course load (I don't expect this to be much of a problem.)

As mentioned, I'm started more courses in a few weeks. They're both physics courses and one of them conflicts with my English course. Apparently conflicting schedules are quite common, partially because you don't get your course schedule until a couple of weeks before class starts. When you sign up, you just hope everything works out. Luckily, the two conflicting lectures are both days where we'll be watching movies so I'm just going to rent them and watch them on my own.

Physics appears to have much more lecture time but they still change time, place, and teacher. I'll let you know how they go.