Life in Dublin, Ireland: First Week of Classes

Okie dokie, as much as I wish I had as many good stories for the first week of classes as I do from Orientation week, the reality is that most of my time this past week involved sitting in our classroom or reading hundreds of pages of textbooks.

Here's an outline of the classes we are all taking:

Quantitative Analysis/Spreadsheets

Corporate Financial Management

Business in Society

Management and Organization

Economics for a Global Market

Accounting and Financial Management

Personal/Career Development

Each class is 3.5 hours long. Yup, that's right. Almost 4 hours in the classroom per subject! That means often we are covering 2-3 chapters of each text every class. The schedule is mostly 9am-12:30pm for the morning class and then 2-5:30pm for the afternoon class. Thursdays we only have an afternoon class, and often on Wednesdays we have more career development classwork as opposed to regular courses. Furthermore, while our weekly schedule is fairly consistent, it is not entirely so. And for those of you Davis grads (or other folks on the quarter system), if you thought 10 weeks was short, our classes only last for 7 weeks. We have a "reading week" at the start of November for folks to play 'catch-up' on reading, and then a week and a half to study for exams before they start (which is the only improvement over the non-existent 'dead week' at Davis).

The first week was successful, albeit with many cups of coffee consumed. Most of the classes involve group projects, and our class has been divided into 6 groups of 5-6 people (we had one addition to the class this week, so we have 31 people total) whom we will work with on all group stuff for the remainder of the term. Each of our groups have our own "office" as it were to work on projects or to simply study in. Our offices are all bunched together on the 4th floor of the business building, and we have a lounge area in the middle as well for chilling out when time allows. To complete the package, we have our own copier/printer and kitchen! Wooot! Hey, it's all about the simple things in life.

Since Thursday classes did not start until 2pm this week, a group of us went "for a drink" on Wednesday afternoon. The Core 4 teamed up, deciding we would not be out late this time, because even though we did not need to be in until 2pm, there was still plenty of reading and group work to be done.

So, Core 4 is apparently not good at obeying our own plans.

At 3am Thursday morning when I finally made it back to my room after another night out of drinking and dancing, I was determined to not do that again in the middle of the week. Suffice it to say that I spent Thursday morning sleeping off the night before instead of doing additional reading. But hey, I still got 8 hours of sleep!

The week ended with plenty of reading being accomplished, one totally boring class (in one of my favorite subjects unfortunately - corporate finance), one thoroughly exciting class (global finance), and boat loads of reading to do over the weekend. But don't worry, I spent Friday night actually doing work and relaxing instead of going out again.

For the weekend: I spent time doing laundry and reading. And watching a video for a class. And more reading. Don't worry, there are pictures of my reading list for the upcoming week attached, along with my stack of books to read. Yay for school!!!