Bilan

I got to the university this morning and saw all the students waiting the hall. "Oh yeah, French students don't enter the classroom if the professor isn't there..."

The professor in charge of the program was of course very verbose, and spoke during almost the entire 2 hours of orientation/information we had this morning. He was one of those older professors who tries to be hip and use "young" expressions and I wrote down that he said "psycho-machin," as in "psychological-thingy." The colleague he had with him barely got a word in edgewise, even though he was supposed to present half of the program.

Tomorrow and Friday we're doing team building exercises, or as they're known in French, 'Coaching.' We have to work in teams of 4 during the semester on a communication/publicity project outside of our regular class time/work, so these two days of activities are supposed to allow us to figure out who we want to work with.

It seems really strange, but the 'semester' is from October to March, when we'll have exams, and then we do our internship from April to September-ish.

I am one of 4 international students (or 6 if the other two show up who were absent today). They said there were 330 applicants, of which 150 were Chinese. The new vogue among Chinese students is to study in Europe, and when I took the TCF at the Fac des Lettres a year and half ago, 80% of the people present were Chinese. The professor said they wanted a diverse group with students from lots of different academic backgrounds and reserve a few places each year for continuing-education students (i.e. 35-40 years old), and then us foreign students. Coming from a white, college-educated, upper-middle class, Southern-Californian background, I think this is the only time I've ever benefited from quotas or affirmative action. In the States, I'm about as un-diverse as you can get (except that I was born abroad, speak a foreign language....).

There was a cocktail reception tonight with students from last year, but I had to tutor.

I wonder if we're going to do trust falls tomorrow—the exercise where everyone links arms to catch a group member and you have to trust them. I did a bunch of that stuff in 7th grade. Ah, Life Skills. I'll report back about how the French do team building.