Lucy's Travels 2011-2012: First week at UMass

Since arriving at UMass I have eaten every kind of dessert you can imagine, met people from all over the world (but mostly Germany!), drunk many a cheap drink, been to some interesting classes, and gotten lost many times on campus. So far.. It’s awesome.

International students were just about the first people to arrive on campus, in order to overload us with boring and mostly pointless information. On the plus side, we got a lot of free food!

On that note: FOOD. It isn’t as bad as you think. It isn’t all fatty greasy sugary food. There are actually lots of healthy options. I’ve been to 3 of the 5 campus dining halls so far, and they’re all fairly similar, but is a bit bigger and better. All of them have pizza every day. All of them have huge salad bars (with everything you might ever want in a salad, it’s brilliant). All of them have desserts too, and fruit. Each day there are a few different options, there are usually some pastas and I’ve seen a few Mexican tortillas, wraps and sandwiches, rice dishes. You can also pick a bunch of ingredients and they’ll make a stir fry for you (so you see everything that goes in! No added crap!) Essentially, they have everything.

So this week has been the first week of classes, which has been interesting to say the least! It’s very different to at home. Big lectures with 100+ people are very uncommon: and even when you do have a big lecture, it’s more interactive than at home. I like that! Makes me stay awake! I’m doing one graduate subject which is super super hard and I don’t understand anything.. So I might try to get out of that one... Then I have a freshmen course (first year) where he essentially said “if you turn up you’ll pass”- so I like that one!! There’s also a community service component to that subject, so I’m gonna see if I can do that in a school- cos I’d really like to see an American school. My other subject (at this point I’m probably just taking 3 subjects) is International Education, which I think will be quite interesting, and not toooo hard!

I love the campus. It’s huge, but I don’t mind the walking. The gym is incredibly amazingly humongously huge. A bunch of us went down to try out the “Box Ballet” class, but it wasn’t on! So I’m yet to try any classes.. But I will get onto it don’t you worry!! They also have their own ice skting rink here (for the hockey team) and during our orientation there was free skating! So fun!!! (and no, I didn’t fall over once!)

I still have no room mate (I'm told I might get one in the next week or two, but there's no way of knowing yet), but there's some nice people in my suite! And I've meet some nice people in my classes too.

And here's some happy snaps: