I've been meaning to write about the University for the past few days but haven't managed to get round to it. So seeing as today is a public holiday and I've got nothing better to do (besides some varsity work maybe) and I'm glued to my fan because it's so freakishly hot here, (think Durban weather in mid-summer when it's just hot and humid and gross) it seems like an ideal opportunity to tell you about it.
San Diego State University is huge! There are about 35000 students on the campus. It's by far the biggest university in San Diego and one of the biggest in the Western part of the USA (according to the SDSU website). There are just so many people on campus every day (except Fridays - it appears that the American College student's weekend begins on a Thursday evening). I also never get there that early as all my classes are in the afternoon so I haven't even seen peak times at the campus yet. Apparently it gets so bad that the university has 'congestion plans' in place for the roads around the campus.
The campus is rather enormous - check out the campus map if you don't believe me! All my classes are on the side closest to where I live so there's not too much walking involved every day. Although the other day I had to trek all the way over to the other side of campus to a copy centre by the residences. Ok - I'm being a wuss, the walk itself is not too bad but doing it at midday on a revoltingly hot day maybe wasn't the smartest idea I've ever had. The campus is really pretty - I walked around like a total tourist the other day taking some pictures for your viewing pleasure.
This is one of the oldest parts of the campus - it's the part you see on the university logo. There's a tower hidden by the palm trees on the left (palm trees grow so big here!) and I'm not sure if the bells I hear are from that tower or the little bells you can see in the picture (vaguely) above the arch.
The dome on the left is the entrance to the Love Library although the library itself is the white building you can see a bit of on the right of the picture. The library is amazing! It's enormous (and air conditioned - yay!). It also houses the student computing centre which has about 600 machines for you to use at any time I think.
I was went exploring the library one day when I had some time to kill and in one of the passages there was this guy sleeping! In the middle of the day! I was quite surprised until I went round the corner and saw lots of students sleeping or otherwise parking off on the chairs. Being a student is apparently very tiring - I should know I suppose, I used to have frequent afternoon naps.
The campus is huge! It literally goes on for as far as the eye can see in this picture!
The pretty pedestrian bridge which goes over on of the busy streets in the area from the campus to the main section of residence halls (which you can see on the right of the picture).So that would conclude the 'mini campus tour'. I could put a whole lot more pics up but as far as I'm concerned pictures of buildings are generally boring. But let me know if you disagree and we'll see what we can do.
Now onto the reason I go to university (supposedly) - my courses (or classes as they are called here). I'm taking four classes at the moment, 3 are required and then one elective. Microeconomics looks quite interesting, it doesn't look too hectic at the moment which is a really good thing given my shocking lecturer last year! It does look quite mathematical but that should be ok. Econometrics, I'm sad to say, looks deathly boring. I think I've done pretty much everything before. The wierd thing is that we have theoretical classes (2 per week) and then our pracs are run by a completely different lecturer. So I think the course may be largely theory. I'm not too sure how that's going to work? So I might have to put in a fair amount of work after all. During the Econometrics Lab (as pracs are called here) we're learning SAS which I've never used before so that should be interesting.
Then my elective is international trade. I was a bit worried about this as I've never done any international economics courses before but it looks great. We're looking at trade purely from a microeconomics perspective. Undergrad students are allowed to take this course too so we have a really big class! Classes here have a size restriction - in the case of international trade, only 35 people are allowed to register. Unfortunately the class was already full when I registered so I spoke to the graduate advisor and she said not to worry, that as I was a graduate student in the economics program I would be allowed to 'crash' the course. I think that term is so funny! Essentially hat you do is you go to the class and ask the lecturer for an 'add code' which then lets you register for the class. So crashing isn't as exciting as it sounds.
I got a job! Yay! In the Economics department as a graduate assistant. So now I get to spend even more time on campus. I'm helping one of the lecturers who teaches micro 101 but in a class of 500! So we have to go to the lectures and help and will also have 2 hours of consultation times during the week. Then the big thing is helping 'grade' exams. They don't have tests here - I nearly died when they said I had 3 exams for some of my classes! But essentially they're 2 midterm tests in the lesson period (so just an hour or so) and then one 2hr exam as I know them at the end of the semester. So I'm employed for a total of 10 hours a week . Not sure what the rate of pay is but any extra spending money helps! Now I need to fill in forms and get a social security number etc - what fun, I love paperwork.
The only bad thing about this job is that I have to go to the one class which is on a Friday so I no longer have Fridays free :-( But when you consider the fact that because I'm on a student visa I'm only allowed to work on campus I think I can live with it. I'd much rather work as a graduate assistant than in the bookshop stacking shelves or for campus foods or something like that.
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