After all these orientation activities and welcome parties finally the true university life began. During the last three days I had my first classes and my first impression is pretty good.
I'm taking four classes at TRU: The Tourism Industy, Human Resources Management, Organizational Leadership and Environmental Issues of the Tourism Industry.
So far I can't really say anything about the content of the classes as we just talked about assignments and the stucture of the class and other organizational things. Anyways, the classes seemed really interesting. We are small groups, from 16 to 40 people which is nice as you are more involved in the lecture and don't just sit and listen. Something that's different from my home university is that we have to do a lot of assignments. Each course requires at least 3 assignments and a midterm additional to the final exam. So I will have to work a lot more than I did at home. But the assigments also seem interesting and we have to be pretty creative. For one class, as an example, we have to create a video and a blog, in another class we have to collect travel pictures of ourselves. So, as you can see, it's not hard work, only time consuming.
Today we had a huge Back to School-BBQ organized by the student union. That meant a lot of free stuff, hamburgers and live music. (And some chilling, for a change.)
Friday, September 7, 2012
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Exploring the nature
As we are in Canada and there is a lot of nature and mountains around here it didn't take long for me to go on my first hiking trip. (Careful readers might remember that I was on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver. However, I went up there with the gondola so it doesn't count as hiking.)
As already mentioned in the last post, on Saturday we went to Sun Peaks, which is a nice skiing resort about 45 minutes away from Kamloops. We went up there by bus and as soon as I was on the street I felt like I was in Austria. The same small village with restaurants, hotels and skiing lifts as you can find them somewhere in Salzburg or Tyrol. As we still had some time until the concert started, we took the chairlift up to the mountain and enoyed the wonderful view from the top. Then we took a little walk through the town and finally we watched the Matthew Good concert while sitting directly on the skiing slope. It was a wonderful day and even the rainy and cold weather couldn't prevent us from enoying ourselves.
As you might have realized, even tough we went to a mountain, there was still no hiking involved. The real sport followed on Sunday. We took off to explore the local mountains (or rather hills) on foot. Right behind Thompson Rivers University is a small park calles Kenna Cartwright Park, which is basically just a little hill. We went there and after about one hour of hiking uphill we made to a nice picnic place from where we had a wonderful view of the city of Kamloops. It was exhausting as hell but worth it!
Today the university year officially started with the First Year Student Convocation Ceremony. We all met at 8:30 and everyone got a T-Shirt with the color of their program (Tourism was purple, for whatever reason). Then we all sat down at a huge tribune. After this we heard some speeches of important people of the university and then we had to officially swear an oath to be good students. We then were divided in our faculties and went to meet some more people. The day ended with a free BBQ and a lot of booths, all over campus where we met the people from different associations of the university like the Students Union. Basically, all we did was walking around, talking to people and collecting free stuff like candy, pens, notepads, frisbees, water bottles...
I guess this was the end of the funny university life. Tomorrow classes start and the real life begins. Up to now all we did at the campus was having fun and eating free food. I guess it can't be like this forever. =)
Anyways I am very thrilled to find out how hard classes in Canada really are.
As already mentioned in the last post, on Saturday we went to Sun Peaks, which is a nice skiing resort about 45 minutes away from Kamloops. We went up there by bus and as soon as I was on the street I felt like I was in Austria. The same small village with restaurants, hotels and skiing lifts as you can find them somewhere in Salzburg or Tyrol. As we still had some time until the concert started, we took the chairlift up to the mountain and enoyed the wonderful view from the top. Then we took a little walk through the town and finally we watched the Matthew Good concert while sitting directly on the skiing slope. It was a wonderful day and even the rainy and cold weather couldn't prevent us from enoying ourselves.
As you might have realized, even tough we went to a mountain, there was still no hiking involved. The real sport followed on Sunday. We took off to explore the local mountains (or rather hills) on foot. Right behind Thompson Rivers University is a small park calles Kenna Cartwright Park, which is basically just a little hill. We went there and after about one hour of hiking uphill we made to a nice picnic place from where we had a wonderful view of the city of Kamloops. It was exhausting as hell but worth it!
Today the university year officially started with the First Year Student Convocation Ceremony. We all met at 8:30 and everyone got a T-Shirt with the color of their program (Tourism was purple, for whatever reason). Then we all sat down at a huge tribune. After this we heard some speeches of important people of the university and then we had to officially swear an oath to be good students. We then were divided in our faculties and went to meet some more people. The day ended with a free BBQ and a lot of booths, all over campus where we met the people from different associations of the university like the Students Union. Basically, all we did was walking around, talking to people and collecting free stuff like candy, pens, notepads, frisbees, water bottles...
I guess this was the end of the funny university life. Tomorrow classes start and the real life begins. Up to now all we did at the campus was having fun and eating free food. I guess it can't be like this forever. =)
Anyways I am very thrilled to find out how hard classes in Canada really are.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Orientation week
Thompson Rivers University is obviously quite a big university. This week, international student orientation started (and is still in progress) and there are about 1400 students (Just international ones!! The Canadians follow next week). So what exactly is this student orientation thing?
Basically, it's a really well planned week of events like information sessions, get togethers and things like this. So, while we hear a lot about Kamloops and Canada and the risks and opportunities of studying abroad, we also have to organise stuff like getting our schedules ready, getting the student ID, and buying our books (I still have to do that, I'm hoping to find cheap ones on the internet as the two books I need cost 100 bucks each at the bookstore and I'm not super-rich). Besides that we got free lunch every day and we're meeting a lot of other students.
There are a lot of exchange students from all different countries which is quite interesting. Something I didn't expect at all it the fact that there are so many Austrians. It is normal to meet Germans abroad but I hardly ever met Austrians and we've got a lot of us here. It is interesting to meet so many people from different cultures and experience differences between the behaviour and things like this.
The university created an organisation called ISAP that organises a lot of events for international students. For example this week we went to the cinema once and yesterday we went to a concert at riverside park. There's a huge river going through Kamloops, called the Thompson River and next to it there is a park where they host free concerts every day in summer. It's open air so you just go there and sit down in the grass and listen to nice music. It was still warm in the evening so it was really nice to sit together and have some fun. Tomorrow we will go to Sun Peaks, which is the local skiing hill to see another concert up there. I've heard that the mountain is really nice so I'm really looking forward to going there. During the whole semester, there will be a lot more events by ISAP like a Halloween party, a wine-tasting tour and different excursions.
Today we had an international gathering, which was kind of the final event of our students orientation week. A lot of people were wearing their national dresses and we had international food. We talked to each other and there were some speeches of the president of TRU and some other people. One girl from Easter Islands performed a traditional dance which was quite impressive and at the end we just danced around with our flags to international music.
Basically, it's a really well planned week of events like information sessions, get togethers and things like this. So, while we hear a lot about Kamloops and Canada and the risks and opportunities of studying abroad, we also have to organise stuff like getting our schedules ready, getting the student ID, and buying our books (I still have to do that, I'm hoping to find cheap ones on the internet as the two books I need cost 100 bucks each at the bookstore and I'm not super-rich). Besides that we got free lunch every day and we're meeting a lot of other students.
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| How do you peel a banana? - Experiment |
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| Germany, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Austria, the Netherlands, France, ... |
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| Thompson River |
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| Paul Filek @ Riverside Park |
Today we had an international gathering, which was kind of the final event of our students orientation week. A lot of people were wearing their national dresses and we had international food. We talked to each other and there were some speeches of the president of TRU and some other people. One girl from Easter Islands performed a traditional dance which was quite impressive and at the end we just danced around with our flags to international music.
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| "I am from Austria!!" |
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