school's out for the summer!

I'm freeee!! Wahoooo....

Thursday I finished with all of my exams and papers for the semester. Yay! Such a great change to be finished with the semester before Thanksgiving.

Although I enjoyed the content of most of my university classes and I am now a much faster reader and writer in spanish, I think I would have preferred to have spent all my time just working on my verbal skills instead. But such is life and such are college graduation requirements. Let's just hope that Penn accepts the credits that they said they would.

These next few posts are going to be a lot of count-downs/summaries. Here is the first:

Top 3 things I'm going to miss about school in Chile:

1) Cheap books

Much to my wallet's delight, I didn't purchase one single textbook this semester. Down here, books are absurdly overpriced. Thus, I textbooks are practially luxury items. Solution? Professors leave the texts on reserve in the library and then students go make photocopies of those texts. I'm not sure how legal this system is. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's about as legal as pirated movies and cds...however, that is the system and the money I saved on textbooks helped me rationalize the money I spent on trips and such throughout the semester. 

2) Always on time

Although I generally made it to my classes about 5-10 minutes after their official start time, I was never late. Professors generally stroll in about 10 minutes late. Chilean students come in 5 minutes later. Students who walk in late are never condemned by the professer and, in fact, are barely even noticed. This time lapse was quite a lifesaver, especially on those days when I woke up at 8AM for an 8:30 class (at a campus about 45 minutes from my house). 

3) Distance makes the heart grow fonder

All universities down here are commuter campuses. Therefore, when the school day is over, you actually leave campus and go home. While the endless hours of commuting to class were definitely exhausting, they were also a much needed blessing of time. I made sure to save my metro rides to and from school a sacred "me time" where I could read, relax to the sounds of my ipod or simply stare out the window and reflect. These metro rides separated my school life from my personal life...a nice change from living on a campus where it's hard to separate yourself from homework or people talking about their heaps homework or people stresing about talking about their homwork.

 

Top 4 things I'm not going to miss about school in Chile:

1) Public grades

Oh yes, privacy is just not something that Latin Americans pride themselves on. So why should they change their ways to keep a silly little number private? I think the purpose of publishing grades is to incentivize competition and encourage students to take personal pride in their work. Definitely a helpful tool down here, but I sure am glad we have privacy of our grades back at Penn...there's enough competition and obsession with grades up their as it is.

2) The library is now closing (but it's still light outside!!)

Since all students are commuters, the campuses actually shut down at night time! This means no 24 hour libraries. Boy did I miss Van Pelt this semester.

3) Callete huevon (hush ya'll!)

It's definitely not uncommon for students to talk during class. And not just whisper talk-- like have a lively loud conversation. Quite frustrating when I can barely understand the professor to begin with.

4) Madness

Return to my posts about class registration from the beginning of the semester for memories of this madness. Much different than the beautiful Penn InTouch registration system with all its organized majesty. Also, things have been a little inconvenient the past week or so because the maintenance workers throughout the university went on a salary strike. Nobody was there to work the printers or the library, so we had to made due with out them. Annoying, but it surprisingly unphased me this time...it's definitely going to be weird going back and not running into a weekly strike.