Classes at Cambridge

Yalu said my last blog entry was lame. So instead of having things in chronological order like I was thinking about, I'll just write in categories. Here's an entry on classes.

I got talked in to taking more classes. Engineering students at Cambridge take 5 classes per term (for the first 2 terms) in their 3rd year. Since they're not allowed to take classes outside the department, these are all technical classes. Well, in the 3rd and 4th years, they can take a language class in the Engineering Language Unit as a module (class). But either way, I've never taken so many technical classes in one term before so I had planned to take only 3 per term for a total of 6 technical classes and then take 2 languages (Chinese and German). [Part of my blogspot decided to revert to German again, not sure why] Anyhow, we (Course 1 people) only need to take 4 classes at Cambridge to keep up with the MIT requirements. So we decided to take extra classes for fun. We're getting the chance to take so much more engineering classes. I mean, I guess Course 1 is designed so that you get to take electives in your senior year but with all these HASS requirements, I don't feel like we get as much engineering at all.

So I've chosen 8 technical classes that I wanted to take. Mahalia and Stella are both taking 10. We're assigned a Student Coordinator since we're exchange students and he was happy that I was taking less than 10. Whatever. I want to learn these languages and not kill myself with engineering stuff. A rough guide is 1.5 Cambridge class = 1 MIT class.

Now these classes are only 2 hours a week. So I'm taking 6 classes a term. That's only 12 hours of lecture time per week. So far I have no classes on Mondays and barely anything on Wednesdays and Fridays. But of course there's more. I will have one 1 hour supervision per class every 2 weeks. That's in comparision to 2 hours of recitation per class at MIT per week (for Course 1). And I have one 2-4 hour lab per class (so 4 classes = ~8 hours of lab total per term), compared to 4 hours of lab per week at MIT. And then there's the Engineering Area Activity which is 2 and a half days. And for 4 weeks in the Easter term, we have engineering projects where we go and build bridges or something like that. So I guess the Engineering Area Activity and the projects make up for all the lab hours at MIT?

Sorry if all of this was confusing. It certainly was for me. Long story short, I have a lot more free time during the term than I would have had at MIT. Yet I'm somehow learning more... interesting. We'll see how this goes.