First: Yes there will be more updates from the last; I've been too busy trying to deal with what I'm about to describe to write posts about all the really incredible experiences I've had since the Bulgarian party.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain


Part of my "mission" here is to encourage other geeks (Software & Info Systems, Comp Sci, etc) to study abroad. At UNCC, our college lags behind all the others in the percentage of students who take advantage of our pretty solid education abroad programs. So, while the business students are enjoying Australian beaches and German beer, and getting a totally different and fresh perspective on their discipline at the same time, geeks are stuck in Charlotte to continue to in-breed ideas without significant external influence and with a growing vitamin D deficiency.

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education." - George Bernard Shaw


However, I just can't in good conscience encourage other geeks to explore the world. It's too damn risky in our college at UNCC... Australia went off pretty smooth because I fulfilled all my honors requirements when the SIS people wouldn't work with me. Now I'm in Germany, with no honors requirements, and in serious danger of losing my whole scholarship because I didn't apply for classes with other UNCC students... a month before lists of classes were even available in Germany! That's right, even though the German semester is one month behind the US, if you're in Woodward then you'll be expected to somehow predict which German classes will be offered during the following semester and to apply for their respective counterparts at UNCC.

Here's how it's supposed to work:


Since it's often impossible to register for classes or even to know which classes are available in the destination country before you arrive, the office of education abroad reserves a special "blank" 12 credit hour class for you. Once you return with your transcript from the foreign university, the office of education abroad then uses a grade table to translate the foreign grades into local grades, and substitutes the courses you took abroad for the 12 credit hour placeholder.

"College isn't the place to go for ideas." - Helen Keller


And that's a great system! If your professors will go for it... otherwise, you end up stranded in another country weeks after UNCC has started classes, and maybe that other country doesn't even HAVE class registrations (*cough* Germany) so you find out about the courses by attending their first lectures. Once you painstakingly translate everything that's in (German) to English on the various websites where the course outlines and books get posted, and try to get in touch with your professors back home to work out an exchange agreement, you're told that UNCC registration has already closed and you just won't be getting any credit this semester. Now your scholarship is in peril. Awesome!

"A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students." - John Ciardi


So anyway - just don't do it. If you're a geek and you want to travel, go to a university whose version of Woodward embraces international exchange. Chapel Hill, for example. Or Caltech. Something more low-key? Wilmington! Anyplace but UNCC...

On my way to being a pauper,
Hunter