One Full Week of Classes in the Books, no Pun Intended.

Hey. So I just finished a full week of classes, and it was absolutely incredible. If you had a privilege of seeing a secret, short lived blog post, (it was up for only a few hours), forgive me. This one will be positive. If you are curious, I essentially ranted about AURs way of handling orientation, scheduling, and credit transfers. Let's face it, AUR is not Northeastern, where despite the red-tape, the know how to run a University of 16,000 students. However, no one wants to hear about my scheduling problems, and they are mostly behind me now, so on to the good stuff.

First off, while prancing around Rome and staying out till the wee hours of the morning, I am also taking Art of Rome, Consumer Behavior, International Finance, and Italian. On paper they seem like a great group of classes, (possibly the best single semester ever) and they have not disappointed so far. Overall, the classes are taught by the most intelligent, world-traveled professors you could possibly imagine. Picture the most interesting man in the world, (of Dos Equis fame) deciding he wants to inspire the minds of study abroad students, rather than promote a bad mexican beer, and you will get an idea of the caliber of professors teaching my classes.

Art of Rome is essentially a weekly tour of a historic monument or piece or artwork where we analyze the artist, history, and the methodology behind the artwork. International finance is equally as interesting; the professor uses his experience working at Disney to help teach us some of the core concepts. He even explained the Enron scandal by first explaining that how he artificially inflated numbers while working at Disney. Next is Consumer Behavior, which may turn our to be the most interesting class I have ever taken. The professor used to be an investment banker on Wall Street, but now he teaches because it makes him happy. He is extremely intelligent, honest, and even vulnerable, and helps us to discover those qualities in ourselves. Obviously, the point of the class is to learn what drives consumers to buy, but we are analyzing consumer behavior by taking an extremely in depth look at ourselves. Finally, I'm taking Italian, taught by a very animated and very, very Italian woman. (Hairy armpits and all). We don't learn by memorizing vocab, we learn by doing. We have conversations in Italian, and any exercise in the book is always spoken out loud. It's not a linear style of learning and I think it will be very effective.

That's about all I have on my classes, look for a new post sometime today about very interesting bar crawl...