The university experience in Spain is pretty different from that in the United States. The first week of school was a whole new round of culture shock.
- The Classrooms
In theory, there is a numbering system to the rooms. The campus that I attended all three of my classes in included two different faculties, Philology and Geography & History. The latter has classrooms numbered with roman numerals, and the former with normal numbers. But that’s about where the logic ends. Even with maps (still missing information), it took me half an hour to find each room during the first week. I’d even ask the local students, and nobody would have any idea where my classroom was. Super helpful huh?
- The Professors
The professors are all really nice, although some can be relatively intimidating. The language barrier doesn’t help with that. They all really are accommodating, for the most part. Mumblers can be difficult: my professor for my class Political Ideologies and Social Movements in Contemporary Spain is a mumbler, and I really have to strain to pick up what he’s saying, which, more often than not, turns out to be a wild tangent anyway. More difficult than mumblers, however, are ramblers: I tested out a class called Contemporary Societies, where a professor really stood and professed, einstein tufts of gray hair flying every which way as I stared at his profound gestures and listened to not a word of his long rants about one thing or another. My favorite professor is my History of the “Iberoamerican” Independence, Maria Petit-Breuilh. She has a ridiculously high voice, but she’s super sweet and really wants to help us dumb americans out. Being from Chile, she has a very clear accent, which helps as well.
- The Students
Generally, the students have pretty thick Sevilla accents. And they talk really quickly. And they are, as a result, virtually impossible to understand. They are embarrassingly good at answering questions. I’m doing all I can to follow what goes on when they get some real good back-and-forth going.
Being in class with Callie, though, has of course inevitably led to a handful of local friends. In my Languages of the World class, Callie randomly one day asked a girl sitting next to us if she wanted to go get coffee later. A little perturbed but open-minded, she said yes. Her name is Nuria, and she’s turned out to be a great friend and local guide. We’ve hung out on a couple of occasions, eating chestnuts and giggling about boy stupidity (universal, apparently).
In my class Political Ideologies and Social Movements of Contemporary Spain (where “Contemporary” indicates the years 1800+), we asked a guy sitting next to us one day if he wouldn’t mind sharing with us his notes. He told us he didn’t take any. Luis wrote roughly two lines a day, if he decided he wanted to come to class, while I was typing 3-4 pages of frantic notes each class. Either it’s overkill on my part or a big F is heading in his direction from the exam department, but I suppose only time will tell. Luis, though, is something of an interesting guy. He’s 27, majoring in something politicky, and believes that one day capitalism will fail and that ultimately anarchy will be our governmental style. How he thinks that could ever possibly be stable is beyond me. He kept asking me to hang out with him outside of class, and towards the end of the semester Luis and I grabbed a couple of beers and spent something like four hours chatting about everything under the sun, even dabbling in a little English (his is kind of terrible, but don’t tell him I said that).
In a lot of classes are other foreign students, but very few are from the US: in Europe, there is a program known as Erasmus, wherein any student in the EU can study in any other university in the EU. Tons of people in my classes were French, German, Italian... It made for some pretty fun diversity. In one class, actually, I met some Japanese girls. It was very cute - and very strange to hear a Japanese accent in Spanish (“sí” was pretty much always “shi”). It led to a lot of inner merriment, and a lot of mental confusion when I would want to reply in Japanese (“Sou ne! Um, I mean, sí, claro.”) instead of Spanish when we talked.
- The Classes
I’m taking three classes here: Political Ideologies of and Social Movements of Contemporary Spain, History of Latin America’s Independence, and Languages of the World. I’m also taking one class with my program, a writing workshop. Political Ideologies is really all over the place. The professor literally sits at the front and just talks for 2 hours, leading down all kinds of tangents, and I'm just trying to type fast enough to keep up, before I actually realize it's not really relevant. We’ve had two teachers for this class, actually, and the first was unfortunately a mumbler. The second guy liked to stand and pace while he talked. I liked him better as a teacher, although tangents were more common with this guy. He was nice in office hours though, excited we were taking his class and keen to help us out. As for the rest of the classes, I think I’ve talked about them all in my Day in the Life post.
The class quality in Spain varied, depending on the class, but while I would say the content is probably up to par with anything I might take in the US, the way it was taught is very different. Work, and evaluation criteria, tends to be one big enormous scary exam at the end of the semester, 100% of the grade, as opposed to the US, where at least a couple essays if not additional homework assignments come into play.
Classes themselves tended to be relatively disorganized, actually, and not very well laid out at the beginning, an especially complicating factor for rookies in the system like me. Teachers sort of just jumped up front and started talking, with few class plans and even fewer out-of-class resources available. So we bewildered foreigners go to office hours, much to our professors’ delight, to try and get a handle on what is actually expected of us. It doesn’t help that we technically are leaving early, in December as opposed to February when the actual academic semester finishes, and as such we get some exceptions thrown into the mix. A bit confusing, really. All in all, I would say, although the classes are interesting and at of course a collegiate level, they really don’t, in the end, compare to classes I take at home, with a ton of support, much more performance expected from our end, and generally speaking a more streamlined and interactive manner of learning.
When it comes to class, I discovered in the very beginning that I should also probably stick to material I know. The very first class I sat in on was an economics class, which I thought could be fun; I’ve always wanted to take an econ course, and hey, International Economics? What could be more appropriate? I was thrown in however amongst a whole bunch of econ-savvy Spanish kids whipping out terms I probably didn’t even know in English. Fascinating, but I knew after the first class that there was just no way I’d be able to keep up. Scrap that idea!
I did have trouble one day keeping a grin hidden when I glanced into a class in progress once and saw the following on the board:
“ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
One two three four five six seven eight nine
My name’s James Bond...double oh seven (007)”
I felt pretty smart after that.
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