{"id":173,"date":"2016-03-01T23:59:21","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T06:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/?p=173"},"modified":"2016-03-01T21:15:46","modified_gmt":"2016-03-02T04:15:46","slug":"first-day-of-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/2016\/03\/01\/first-day-of-school\/","title":{"rendered":"first day of school?!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\">I&#8217;ve been on vacation for two and a half months now, but the time has come&#8230; to finally go back to school.<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 490px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/abGI2Ph6uF0yI\/giphy-facebook_s.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">giphy.com<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">It&#8217;s really hard to describe that &#8216;first day of school&#8217; feeling. It&#8217;s like being in first year all over again, where you don&#8217;t really know anyone and don&#8217;t know anything, let alone where your classes are. Except now it&#8217;s even worse, because the people all around me are speaking a different language. When it seems like everyone has their own friend group already, it does seem kind of difficult to insert yourself into their group as well &#8211; especially when you aren&#8217;t fluent in their language and you aren&#8217;t accustomed to their culture.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">There are so many factors to consider when you&#8217;re studying abroad. You want to have a lot of fun and not spend all of your time studying, since you\u00a0<em>are\u00a0<\/em>in a new place and you want to explore. At the same time you&#8217;ve already paid for all your tuition, so you don&#8217;t want to waste money either. You figure out how many courses you want to take (4? 5?) and then you go about choosing which courses to take.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">And then there&#8217;s the problem of choosing courses &#8211; your options are so limited that the courses you originally thought were really interesting, you can&#8217;t take anymore &#8211; all because of a language barrier. It would also be great if you could stack your courses as well, so you can go out and explore the city on your days off &#8211; but the class scheduling system is so different from the one that you&#8217;re used to that it takes you so much longer to decide what to do.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">You can go read blogs online, but then you hear about all these horrible rumours &#8211; not just about classes, but about everything else basically. For example, I&#8217;ve heard rumours about how some people signed up for a class that had a 2 next to it &#8211; meaning it&#8217;s taught in English &#8211; only to go and find out it&#8217;s actually taught in Korean with a tiny, tiny bit of English. Or, you hear that the dryers in the dorm not working very well and having to hang all of your clothes in your already-small room.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">And with all of these rumours in mind, you still have to go to school and make friends? An amazing feat, I think. I don&#8217;t even know how I did it two years ago, when I was in first year.<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 910px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.yonsei.ac.kr\/_res\/en_sc\/img\/intro\/img_camp1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"375\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">yonsei.ac.kr<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">New campuses always seem super huge (although UBC is probably bigger and I have no problems navigating UBC); I&#8217;m just glad I managed to find the building that\u00a0<em>both\u00a0<\/em>my classes are in without getting lost at all (thanks to the map that the exchange student orientation provided me with).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Thankfully, my first class just finished an hour early with no problems at all. The class was taught in English, as promised (the prof initially took attendance in Korean&#8230; and then she said she forgot this was an English class, and she started speaking English after that), and the prof seems super chill and straightforward &#8211; not like some profs who say one thing and actually mean another.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Hopefully all my classes will go this well!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been on vacation for two and a half months now, but the time has come&#8230; to finally go back to school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,334488,194,1158995,524089],"class_list":["post-173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blog","tag-living","tag-school","tag-seoul","tag-yonsei"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":176,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173\/revisions\/176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}