Housing and Classes

Sometimes it's not all it's cracked up to be...

Housing

Brendan and I showed up at UCL on Tuesday because we had International Student Orientation but couldn't move in to our dorms until Friday.  Brendan had received housing in August but I was still, effectively, homeless.  When we got off the plane it was 9am and we had been awake for about 24 hours since we didn't sleep on the plane really.  So we traveled by tube and foot to my cousin's flat in Westminster, each of us with 140 lbs of luggage, since we really had no where else to go.  Unfortunately, my cousin had work and couldn't get home until 10pm so we spent a lot of time trying to stay awake in a park down the street.

We got bored of the park and migrated to my cousin's door.  The next morning we went straight to UCL's accommodation office where they housed me in Goldsmid.  My form had two priorities on it.  1) Proximity and 2) less than 150 pounds a week.  If you'll see the red square towards the bottom of the picture, that's my dorm 2.5 miles from campus.  It's 189 pounds a week which is about $300 a week.  Ridiculous.  I'll be trying to switch out but for now it's really not so bad aside from the cost.

My neighbor, the Queen, lives here at Buckingham Palace.  Her house is closer to UCL than my flat.

Since we couldn't move in until Friday, though, we stayed on my cousin's floor.  He blew up a nice air mattress for us but unfortunately didn't have any blankets so it was freezing cold at night and we couldn't get in each day until he got home at 10pm.  At least we had a place to stay though.  This is my cousin Sam in the photo!  He's really cool.

Classes

The following week we had to register for classes.  I made a time table (schedule) for the eight modules (classes) that I was going to be taking.  I had three engineering classes, a bio class, and a math class that I needed along with three humanities.  The math class didn't work so I picked an engineering class that sounds a whole lot like Multivariable Calculus and emailed the professor on Sunday (classes started Thursday).  The engineering classes were no problem because UCL operates by department.  Then the day before classes started the TFII professor added lecture times which then conflicted with my bio class so I had to drop that.  But I had already registered for my classes and you can't just un-register so I had to go talk to more people.  Then I chose four humanities, hoping one will transfer as PDII and then two others as HASS credits.  The math professor at RPI emailed me back at the end of Friday, the last day I could possibly change my schedule, to tell me that it wouldn't transfer.  Since the departments at UCL don't communicate with each other (because typically people don't take classes outside of their department) they only made a common timetable between all the departments two years ago.  Thus, registering for humanities is really hard because you have to run around to all the departments signing up for them before they close out so we'll see which ones I get into!  I've already gotten into Renaissance Art and Global Geography haha.  Looking forward to them!  And I don't have class on Mondays next semester so I should get to travel quite a bit!  Not too bad in the end?  Though I will probably have to drop Mechanical Engineering now... but then I'll get to take cool BMED classes like Clinical Orthopedics hopefully!

On top of this, it's been really difficult to open a bank account which I need in order to get things like my student Oyster (subway) card and a phone plan.  But I did open an account yesterday!  So that's one problem out of the way!

That's my rant!  I have done quite a few fun things since I've been here though so I'm pretty sure it's worth it.  Field Hockey trials are tomorrow!  Can't wait.