Today marks four weeks in Paris and I'm finally really starting to feel settled. I'm starting to feel good about classes too. The first couple of weeks were a real adjustment, mostly due to the class size. Aside from French which has a whopping 22 students (craziness, I know), all of my other classes have a max of 12-15 students if everyone actually bothers to come to class, which is rare. At first I didn't really feel comfortable with such small classes because you can't really bullshit your way through anything, all profs practice the Socratic method and love to pick on students who clearly didn't do the reading for that class, and if you're not prepared for class you're pretty much screwed. But after that initial shock of so much newness all at once, I'm really enjoying my classes.
Because AUP is so small, and the size of the faculty is so small, and the classes are so small, profs and students have a much more intimate relationship than anything I've ever seen at NU. A lot of the students have the same profs for many classes over their four years at AUP, and are thus able to build a nice rapport with one another. To me, it seems like profs don't really see us students as their inferiors, but rather as equals who they have intellectual conversations with for 1hr20min a couple times a week. It's different, nice even.
Along those same lines, I paid for my trips to Amsterdam and Madrid recently. I've been excited about these trips for a while, but when I realized how small my classes are, I was initially worried that I would feel uncomfortable having to spend so much time, so closely, with my profs. But now that I've started to build a comfortable professional relationship with these individuals, I'm once again really excited about my trips.
Speaking of trips, I'm trying to work out my spring break plans. It's not been fun.
