The Studying of Study Abroad

I’m spending 90 days on my study abroad trip and only 29 days of them will be spent in class. On an average week I will attend class Monday through Thursday from 3 p.m. until approximately 6 p.m. and then on Friday class is from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. When I first learned this would be our class schedule I was a little displeased with the times of class. I have now come to appreciate the class schedule because it is perfect for traveling on the weekend. On the weekends we will travel as soon as we get out of class on Friday, arrive late that night, spend all day Saturday and Sunday site seeing, and then travel back early Monday morning for class at 3 o’clock.

The name and logo of the University I'm attending

I mentioned previously that this is what an average week will look like. I say this because most of our weeks aren’t average. What I mean by this is that most weeks we will leave for part of the week to attend a class field trip. We have five class field trips; Prague/Dresden, Vienna/Venice, Krakow, Auschwitz/Birkenau, Bohemia. These are all trips the whole class goes on and is accompanied by one of our two professors. While we’re there, either Jan or Martin are our own personal tour guides full of knowledge and cool facts.

Most of our class time is spent with guest lectures or with our two main professors (Jan and Martin). The guest lectures range any where from very engaging to putting the whole class to sleep. These lectures are usually about Europe economy, culture, past, or really anything that you could think of. It’s very cool that they come in and lecture for us because it’s always about a new topic and somehow pertain to us here in the Czech Republic.

If we’re not having a guest lecturer then we are usually hearing from either Jan or Martin. These two gentlemen are incredibly knowledgeable and cool, which is why I could hear them talk for hours. Generally, they will lecture on a more important topic or speak with us about the history and significance of an upcoming field trip.

My time spent during these lectures is full of taking notes and fighting off sleeping during the boring lectures. Some lectures can be very dry or just not appealing to most of us students. I totally understand why they bring in these guest lectures to broaden our knowledge on many different topics. On the other hand, the lectures are strictly lectures with very little student interaction and participation. This can make for lots of dozing off and uninterested students.

We take classes in a similar type of room! I sit in the front row.
 

A few times a week we also have our Czech language class, which most dread. We have a wonderful professor who is very patient with our class as a whole. She tries to liven up class by having us play games, practicing dialogue with one another, or writing things on the board. I use to despise this class because the Czech language is very difficult, but now I’ve gotten to the point where I mildly enjoy this language. One thing I wish was different at about the language class is the practicality. Czech is used primarily only in the Czech and loosely in Slovakia. Besides those two places I will never speak Czech again. Therefore, it makes more sense to me to learn more about how to speak in our everyday conversation at restaurants and stores. This would be compared to us currently learning about conjugating, which I will never use during my time here.  

As much as I like to complain about class, it’s not bad at all. Class times are reasonable and were in class for approximately 1/3 of our Study Abroad trip. It will be very interesting taking classes next fall back at UNK. Education is vastly different and has really made me think about our education system in America.  Academic life here is not what I’m used to back home, but I’m not complaining one bit.