This week was full of firsts, with Monday being the first day of class!
The University of Ghana CIEE Fall Class of 2017
At the University of Ghana, undergraduate courses are called lectures, the quintessential aspect of every college experience. I had high expectations for lectures, my first week of classes did not go as smoothly as I had hoped…
To add some context, I am a double major in Political Science and African Studies. Thus, the chance to study politics in the best West African university was an opportunity I hurriedly seized. At the top of my first day schedule was a Political Science course: The Political Development of Africa’s Economy Since Independence. That Monday it took me a little longer to pack my bag because I wanted to make sure I had everything for the day. As a result, I did not have enough time to walk 30 minutes to the lecture and instead chased down a campus taxi and managed to manage to make it to class by 9:15 am, 15 minutes before the 9:30 start time.
More than one hour later, at approximately 10:45 am, the lecturer still hadn’t shown up. As international students, we had been warned this could happen: that professors could be absent, that students could be lacking, that lecture times, classrooms, and department offerings could be swapped well after the first day of class. Because my excitement for a college education in an authentic African setting was the key aspect that fueled my study abroad, I was more than a little disappointed. And by Wednesday, when the third professor out of my seven classes hadn’t been present for the first session, I was tired.
Tired, a bit overwhelmed, but determined not to let the frustration paralyze me. I spent more time going over the directory of classes, visited departments to view the full composite of courses offered this semester, and sought recommendations from full-time students. By the close of the first week, I had found courses such as Investigating Cyberspace, Web Technologies and Design, and The History of Theater in Africa, (where the Professors were present with syllabuses in hand) that excited me even more than my original class selections.
Stay tuned for next week’s Study A-Blog post: #Internships…
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