After being away from classes for 4 months, I survived my first week back!!

This past week was full of the best first classes I have ever had plus my first earthquake experience…Let’s start at the beginning.

Monday/Thursday: Sophia University’s schedule is based off of class periods 1-6 (each class being 1.5 hours) along with a built-in lunch break (American universities take note..) between periods 2 and 3. On Mondays and Thursdays I have classes during 2nd and 4th period, “Japanese” and “Principles of Management”. I thankfully placed into a good section for Japanese which is right where I need to be grammar-wise with a good chunk of review. Because the class is longer time-wise, I am better understanding everything and all the nuances of what we are learning. The professors (one for mon-wed, and the other for thurs-fri) are awesome and make the class very enjoyable! My “Principles of Management” was in a rather small lecture room for the number of people that showed up to take it. The professor walked in and laid down the rules pretty quickly which was intimidating at first. She explained that the course was originally made as a seminar but since the business department is small, she was forced to let more students join (she didn’t seem too happy about this…). Within the first 10 minutes a handful of students had already walked out of class. At the end, my friend and I went to go ask her some questions about the class to make sure we were allowed to stay and she was super easy to talk to. Don’t judge a book by its cover! 😛

Tuesday/Friday: Tuesday and Friday are my busiest days as I have 1st, 2nd, and 3rd period. The real challenge is waking up early and hitting rush hour to school which maybe I will save for another post. 😛 1st period is “International Business” which was the perfect class for me considering my international leadership track at Vanderbilt and career interests. The class is a good mix of international students and Japanese students and the professor is great. For our first lecture we talked about the meaning of globalization and how sports is one of the prime examples of this concept. Our professor was telling us that given the popularity of soccer amongst students, the university’s foreign language enrollment usually goes hand in hand with the winner of the Cup! I thought it was weird at first but then looking back K-pop was behind my decision to learn Korean and ultimately Japanese so it isn’t that far-fetched! After that I have Japanese followed by lunch and then Japanese Society which was another pretty interesting first class. This is my biggest class with about a 100 (if not more) students, mostly girls. My professor walked in and set up all of her slides before introducing herself. Usually when professors introduce themselves it is the usual education background, research interests, etc. but I was not expecting her to say she had broken 2 ribs this past weekend and then proceed to ask the class if anyone else had broken any ribs! :0 The fact that she was actually still in class and giving the introduction (albeit sitting down) was pretty impressive and made for a very memorable first class.

Wednesday: Like most of my friends, I only have Japanese on Wednesdays which gives me some extra library time and a chance to get home before too many people crowd the trains. 😛

As most people know by now, this past Thursday evening was a bit different from the normal routine. Kumamoto experienced a 7.0 earthquake which sent ripples all the way to Tokyo. I was doing my homework when I felt my bed started to shake a little bit and then saw my purse swinging back and forth. As it lasted for what seemed like 10 seconds, I didn’t make anything of it until my phone lit up with messages from my friends asking if that was an earthquake. I will admit it was pretty cool having experienced it for the first time, but seeing the destruction on the news the next morning brought me back to the reality of it. The death toll has rising since the earthquake along with the number of people injured. Please keep the people of Kumamoto in your prayers.

 

 

Tunes:

JYP – Still Alive, Fire

NCT U – 7th Sense