first week of school

Tomorrow I begin my first official day at Pontifica Universidad Cathólica de Chile.  Though I have been nervous about starting real classes I have not lost sight of why I am here, so am excited to start learning more each day and meeting the friends with whom I will share this year-long journey.  Though today, Monday, August 1^st, is actually the first day of classes; the schedule I have arranged has me only attending class Tuesday through Thursday.  Class selection here is very different than I am used to at Sonoma State University.  The first week students are allowed to attend any class that they are interested in and then register after this “shopping period”; securing that it is a course worth taking.  This seems like a good system and works only because there are actually enough classes for all of the students, rather than at SSU where we are all scrambling to fill the limited number of seats.  Starting tomorrow I will take a mandatory Chilean Culture and Spanish grammar class plus two electives.  I will be choosing between Culture and Society in Latin America, History of Mexico, and Politics of Latin America in the 20^th century.  These classes will be taught entirely in Spanish, which is where the real challenge lies, I am a decent communicator in person but understanding lectures with college level vocabulary will certainly be a struggle.  Not to mention that Chileans speak quickly and with a very strong accent, this can make an entire sentence sound like one long word. 

The university I will be attending is a private, catholic school and one of the top ranked universities in Latin America.  Expectations here are much higher than at my home university and I am concerned  about the workload which other students have described as heavily based on outside reading, it will be quite an endeavor to piece together large amounts of scholarly material with my basic (but improving) Spanish.  While nervous about the semester ahead, I feel privileged to have the opportunity to attend such a prestigious university and look forward to all the knowledge I will gain from such a well versed faculty and student body.