First Weeks of Classes on the Books

From February 5th to March 5th I was partaking in an intensive Spanish month at my school here in Argentina. The month consisted of classes and activities Monday-Sunday, for almost the entire day, with homework every night. All of my classes were in Spanish and we had professors for Spanish, History and Culture. There were 17 people in the group, 3 from Japan, 1 from Canada and the rest from the US (mostly from Clemson). We visited places around the city and region together and really got a crash course on argentine life before our semester classes began.

Our semester classes began in early March. I am currently taking Spanish, DELE (a Spanish proficiency exam) prep course, Argentine Literature, and a Latin dance class with other exchange students. I am also taking Portuguese and photography with argentine students.

My class schedule 

One of the big differences between college in Argentina and the US is the textbooks. While we buy huge, couple hundred dollar textbooks in the US that we may or may not end up using for each class, the argentine students have little 100-250 page spiral-bound notebooks that their professor's have created with all the material that they will need. The notebooks consist of photocopied pages from other books, worksheets, and basically anything they want to put in them. The students go to the "photocopier" on campus to get these notebooks. The photocopier is a little center where you tell one of the guys that works there which classes you are taking, they pull up the documents on their computer and then print them for you and you pick them up the next day. The cost of each just depends on how many pages are in each. The most I had to pay for a textbook was about $9 USD.

Another difference is that the students have a very rigid class schedule. Each major has designated classes, no electives and all the students in the major take the same classes together for all four years. My photography class is with freshmen who are in their first semester together but my Portuguese class is with seniors who have already been together for three years. The difference between the students in each group is remarkable. It is different to be in classes that are so separated by year and major rather than having a mix like I am used to in the US.

More about school and classes will come later!

On campus, taken from the 2nd floor of the building I have most of my classes in. The red and white building is tons of computer labs and the white one is classrooms.