Out and about

Just finished registering for my set of classes for the Fall term (in this instance, I will use the word...in all other cases, I'm saying autumn. Just for the record). I have to admit that the concept of registration is rather alien to me - at Oxford, we basically didn't have any choice in the classes we took, at least for the first two years, and even after then we still didn't have anything like the amount of freedom we seem to have here. While you could in theory take classes outside your department, hardly anyone ever did, partly because they were rarely useful and partly because nobody could usually be bothered. I do like the flexibility of the US system, to be sure.

That was after Departmental orientation and discussion with Prof. Shirane of what courses I was planning to take. He had some useful advice about various subjects, most pertinently that I should take a course in literary theory..."Derrida! Foucault! Marx! Engels! Can you hear me Friedrich Engels! Your boys took a hell of a beating!"

You have to be British and into football to get that, so most of you probably won't...

I also went out for Ethiopian last night with some other ISSO students. It was, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost identical to the Eritrean food I had about a month ago, but still tasted great, and I got to meet some more new international students. Again, they seemed like a cool bunch, but you never know how much you're going to get to see them once classes start. It could be that some of the people I've got on best with so far I'll hardly ever bump into again...

Still, I think I'm going to like it here...