Before I jump into our adventures in Portugal, I will tell you a little about the Cardiff University School system and how it differs from Colgate back home by recounting how I have fumbled through the system for these past few months.
Cardiff University is really quite different from Colgate, which is good and bad. Here, your entire grade for some of your classes is dependent entirely on you final exam. Teachers don't assign homework, and rarely recommend you do any work for their course at all. They instead give a recommended reading list and your learning becomes almost entirely self directed. You can focus on learning things that are of particular interest to you, and learn the material at your own pace. This has certainly unnerved some of us, as we don't know what its like to place all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak. We are used to being led gently through the system, constantly bombarded with work and assignments. Poor Sammy and Laura have 100% of their grade dependent on one 15 page paper for their Sociology classes here, where they would have had numerous other papers, tests, and assignments back home at Colgate.
This system also has very little teacher-student interaction. Classes are large lectures, where the lecturer hands out a printout of all the slides. They tell you what is going to be on the exam and they generally don't ask for student participation. Practicals are essentially laboratory classes, and for my Population Ecology class, some of them are marked, others not. Attendance is taken on a roster and you sign next to a number you have been assigned. For our second practical, I showed up to the lab and couldn't find my name on the roster. I also had no idea what my student number was and was completely confused. I finally figured it out (without much help from my supposed teacher). I had to email about 10 different people, and it left me a bit frazzled.
One week, our lecture got rescheduled and moved; it took me a good half hour and the help of a security officer to find the room. The Bioscience building is a total maze, and again, I felt like I was out of the loop. All the bioscience students know each other, so they communicate and news to each other in their other classes.
My next challenge was learning how to turn in assignments. This also proved to be way more difficult then I expected. We have to get a cover page from the undergraduate office, then turn the assignment in in a red box in a room that is definitely a lab room and also hard to find. Thank goodness I have John Dow in my class, he has helped me maneuver the system, and I would be completely hopeless without his help.
The biggest disaster in my attempts at getting through the Cardiff Uni system without incident occurred a couple of weeks ago. I totally forgot that we had practical, and as usual, no warnings were sent out of any kind. I missed the lab, and in a fit of panic, I emailed the lecture to ask if I could redo it. Of course, I could not, and I believe he felt bad enough for me that he let me do at least part of the write up. I had no idea what sort of guideline I should follow for the lab write up, so I just did it in the style of every lab report I have ever written. Hopefully it will be somewhat what was expected.
The next week, I made a point to make it to lab. We went on a field trip and measured and counted young trees out in the woods. The lab was fun, but very basic and required no deep thinking or lab report because it wasn't counted for a mark.
I am beginning to really appreciate what I had at Colgate. Here, people learn facts about our world, but they don't really learn why things are the way they are. If I was at Colgate and I missed a lab, the professor would want me to complete the lab in its entirety so that I could benefit from the knowledge, not just get the points. Also, we interact and talk and discuss things with our Colgate professors on a daily basis in small classes. Our classmates aren't our competitors, they are, in a way, in the same boat so we help them along as best we can. On the other hand, I really like how much Cardiff challenges me to explore and learn on my own, by making my own mistakes if I must.
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