So, the first week of classes has begun. I'm sitting right now at 7:42 a.m. in a room on the fifth floor of the math building here, waiting for 'Differential Equations and Analysis' to start. Yesterday I had Intro to Stochastic, and Number Theory. Last night, I really just had to align my hopes for this week with the actual events that occurred. It's not that I hoped for good things and no good things happened -- rather I hoped for specific good things (finding the classroom, maybe chatting with some other students, feeling like I fit in the class) and not all of those happened, but there were some good things I hadn't been expecting that did happen (like the lovely CS major who walked me from the building I was in to the proper building for my class even though he had a class starting at the same time - something that would not have happened if I had gone to the correct classroom in the first place!).
In general, the day was good. Stochastic was not particularly thrilling nor was it particularly terrifying, and I will put a check mark in the 'good' column for that. Number Theory was indeed terrifying, but I was expecting not being able to take that course - I'm not quite advanced enough yet. For any of my math friends who are reading this, I really needed to have an Abstract Algebra class behind me to be able to understand that course, and the professor wanted proof (haha) that we'd had that by this Friday, so - yeah. Not quite for me yet, but I look forward to when I will actually be prepared to take a Number Theory course.
Oddly enough, this class that I'm waiting for right now is at the same time as two other potential classes for me, but I decided this would be my best bet. I certainly hope it turns out to be a manageable difficulty level, because - well, I'm counting on it, really. It turns out that even Mills, the college that I do hold very dear, can be a real ass about having courses that weren't taken at Mills count for "a Mills credit" (something I experienced last year - I took an upper-division German course at UC Berkeley ((quite the reputable school!)) and only got .67 of a Mills credit for it because it didn't meet enough hours in the week to count for a Mills credit. HOURS IN THE WEEK that the class meets?? What kind of way is that to judge the worth of a course? I could sleep during every hour of the week that a Mills course meets and it would still count for "a Mills credit"! If you couldn't tell, this business has miffed me just a little.).
In other news, the weather is still nice in Mainz - not actual winter yet by any means. This morning at the bus stop it was cool enough for me to stuff my hands in my pockets and shiver just a bit, but the air still tasted like fall. Last week, I also went out with Claudia and we finally bought me a proper winter coat (which I wasn't wearing this morning - I still feel like I have to "save" it, like if I wear it each day, it'll go away!) and I'm SO happy with it. I'm sure it'll appear in pictures soon.
The classroom is starting to fill up now - yeah, 7:55 is a much more normal time for students to show up than 7:30! I guess we will have class soon. This entry was a bit all over the place, but I wanted to give you a brief update. Now I'm going to dive back into math - wish me luck!
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