First off, thanks for at least checking out the blog! I can't guarantee that this will be particularly engrossing, but I do intend to update it fairly regularly (once a week or so) while I am in England. That's right, the purpose of this is to keep everyone up to date with my life while I am abroad. But wait, before you close this shaking your head wondering why I would think you would be interested in that-- just think, it's England. So there is bound to be something interesting for me to talk about. At least a quarter of the time.
But mainly I am doing this so that those of you who want to keep up to date can, and those who don't won't have to constantly be spammed by me with update emails. If you would like to be notified when I update things/post here, just send me an email to my Pomona account and I'll add you to a mailing list.
Anyways, so here is a basic run-down of what I know about my trip at this point:
I am studying abroad in Oxford, England for the fall semester of 2007. Oxford is broken up into nearly 40 colleges, and the particular one I will be studying at is one of the oldest-- University College (as with all things, wikipedia is amazing-- you can check out most everything about it here). While there, in addition to enjoying the fine cuisine and lovely beer (ok, well maybe only the latter) I will be taking three "tutorials". The main one is a one-on-one tutorial with an Oxford professor (or the equivalent) that each of us have designed. Mine is theoretically going to examine the economics of education-- more specifically, the effects of voucher/school choice programs, teacher incentives, etc. All that is of particular interest to me because of my background (both my parents work in public education). Additionally, all nine of us from Pomona take a British Politics course together. Actually, that is probably the course I am most excited about just because Politics is more interesting than Econ to me at this particular moment. The final class I have is a British Architecture class, which I mainly chose in the hopes that a) it would involve traveling to cool places and b) it would be slightly easier than the other courses. Which of course means it will be purely bookwork and crazy difficult.
I leave September 7th on a flight that lands the 8th. I fly from Ontario CA to Houston TX, where I meet up with Kasyn (yay for flying with someone! and for seeing Kasyn again, after playing phone tag all summer long). From there, take a flight to London Gatwick, and hopefully manage to find a bus going to Oxford. And then try and figure out where the heck we are going to stay until the program officially begins on the 10th.
It sounds like we are living in the University College dorms for the first few weeks, and then we move into home stays after that point.
Our academic program runs until December 1st, and I am staying around until the 9th when I fly home. And I'm hopefully going to make it to Oktoberfest in Munich.
But really, I have no idea whatsoever what happens in between when I show up and when I leave. Probably slow starvation, because food is evidently ridiculously expensive there. And the exchange rate is only going to get worse. But as of today, I haven't really received any info about my trip (outside of a food stipend). So hopefully I will figure some of it out soon-ish. I leave in less than four weeks now, so I better.
Anyhow, thats enough rambling for today. More about how unprepared I am in the coming weeks.
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