Senior year revisited

Classes started today, and they started well considering my first class was at 9am. My Human Resource Development class was cool, I'm excited for it. I also met a girl from Minnesota who worked with one of my best friends from high school. It was nice meeting someone else from Minnesotaa, we come few and far between here. Which may not mean much to you, but when there are about 10 people from Boston in one class it gets pretty exciting to see people from your part of the country. The interesting part of this first class though is that it is about half Irish students and the other half international students, mostly from Boston. So I'm taking class with people from all over Ireland, Spain, the states, Canada, Italy, Germany and Argentina. So it should be an interesting semester.

Class number 2 gave me some problems though. Well, maybe not problems, but... ok I got lost. I say today reminds me of my senior year of high school, and this is because it was my first year of college. And even then I had been on campus earlier in the summer so I knew my way around mostly. So being on a new campus and not knowing where buildings or rooms are is relatively new to me. Being the genious that I am, I circled the wrong building on my map for my finance class. Mind you, I only had 10 minutes between classes to locate this building and get to class. So I go into the complete wrong place, leave, look around in circles for a bit, consulte my map discretely, and then finally walk to the right building. After figuring out which theatre my class was in I am safely walking in the doors 10 minutes late with about half the class. An interesting thing about this lecture hall is that it was bench seating with long tables for desks. Rather uncomfortable and the desk/table thing was really skinny. My first assignment for Finance is to make 2 stock portfolios for 2 different people using growth shares and value shares. Which of course I have no idea how to make a stock portfolio. I think I'll be getting to know my Finance professor very well. I'm thankful my roommate Hayley is in the same class as well.

Next I was supposed to have my Finance tutorial in the Quinn building. However, I somehow managed to miss the fact that tutorials are not going to start for a few weeks. So when I get to the room the lights are off and no one is in the room. I wandered around confused and asked a professor in the other room, the people at the front desk and no one could help me. I left the building feeling dejected and silly. Especially silly now that Hayley has told me tutorials don't start for a few weeks and I spent all that energy to find a class that wasn't going on.

For those of you who may be curious, University College Dublin has about 22,000 people and is the largest university in Ireland. The school was founded in the 1850s about the same time as the U of M. However, the university moved to this campus in the 1950s, so the builidings are not as old as some at the U. Campus is absolutely dead on the weekends as everyone usually goes home to visit family or the international students travel places, nothing at all is open. New students are called "freshers." Every class gets a party, which I think means that every class I'm taking gets a party, or something like that.

So in about an hour I have my final class of the day, Marketing. Hopefully this will go better than finding my non-existent class.