there are a bunch of lecture halls in the basement of the library, and i was wandering lost when sophie saw me and showed me where to go. i sat down in a row next to some random asian girls, and was soon surrounded by asian people not speaking english. the class is big, about 350 people. the professor seems nice, but the class is primarily focused on mammalian and human cells, which don't interest me as much as bacteria, and the students are assumed to have taken a developmental bio class last year, which i have not. there is also a 2 hour lab, in addition to 4 hours of class every week.
after that i went to the international office to switch out of the 2 maori language classes i was signed up for (gael said they would probably be hard even tho they are intro level, since all kiwi kids know some basic maori) and sign up for computational biology and anthropology of pacific peoples instead. after waiting in a huge line for almost an hour, i found out i actually had to do that in a different office. so i went there, and told the 4 other ies girls in line behind me they were in the wrong place. there, they put me in the anthro class, and gave me a form to have the cs department fill out saying i had enough prerequisites to take the class.
so then i went to the science building office, and was sent to a lady in the cs department, who sent me to another guy in the cs department, who looked at my transcript and asked me whether i had learned some cs stuff from last year, most of which i remembered the names of but i think i'm going to have to review a lot. he said i should be fine, and showed me the website with the lectures from the prereq class so if there was anything i had not learned i could find it there. then i went to return that paperwork to the office but there was a line and by that time i had to go to class again so i just left.
i found my way to the correct room for computational biology after a lot of lost wandering, and it was a lot smaller than mol. bio, about 45 students. the prof, who i emailed last semester is really young, maybe 30, and he said he's not going to be around for awhile after this week because his first son was just born. he went here in the 90's, then did a post doc at oxford, and is now teaching here again, as well as running a bioinformatics software company he started. pretty cool guy. basically everyone in that class is a cs major, and he had a show of hands of who had not done any bio since high school, which was most of the class. so i'm probably going to be way ahead on bio and a little behind on comp sci there, but that should be fine since that's my only hard class. i stayed after class and asked him what he thought and he said i'd probably be fine, and this other girl who was behind me was like freaking out that it would be too hard, and when he said there's about a 70% pass rate she really freaked out, but he said that's normal, and i don't know what the pass rate at home is to compare. it sounds like a lot of fun so i'm not too worried.
after that i went back and turned in my paperwork, and i saw cameron and barret (kids from IH) while walking. then i came back to my room and was really sweaty from all the hills here and my room was sweltering so i just did computer stuff for awhile. i went to dinner at 6:30 with sophie ej and kendall, and emily, the other ies girl sat with us and we talked about our trips and classes and stuff. sophie and kendall are in the linguistics of pacific languages class that i kind of wanted to do, and when i told them about bio they said to drop it and take that instead. so after dinner i emailed dr. marquis (my advisor) to make sure computational biology would count toward my major, and decided if he said yeah i would drop bio, because why waste the time and effort if i don't need to?
there was an ih 'quiz night' in the cafeteria at 7:30 and we decided to go for lack of anything else to do. we sat down with cameron, alex (who's from france), barret, and brian, but we had to be in teams of 5 so it was alex, cameron, ej, sophie, and me. there were all kinds of random questions, from naming the cd and artist from album art, to greek mythology questions (which cameron knew everything about), to word puzzles (which i was pretty awesome at) to geography. cameron lived in france for a year, so he and alex kept conversing in french, and i was pretty impressed with how much i understood. we were very competitive, but despite our best efforts we did not win, but barret and brian's team did so they gave us some of the chocolate they won after. we then decided to teach them the snowball game from chrristchurch, so we all hung out in sophie's room and played 2 rounds of that, and then i went to bed.
(also, this is old but on sunday night we hung out in cameron's room and they were playing all these youtube videos that the urtv kids like, so then i showed them a bunch of urtv videos, some of which they actually thought were funny.)
today i decided to go to one more bio lecture before making my final decision (dr. marquis said computational bio is fine), so i went, only it's in a different room on tuesday, but i was early enough so it didn't matter. it was slightly more interesting, but not enough to make me want to get up that early every day. so i'm dropping that this afternoon, meaning on tuesday and thursday i don't have class till 5. i don't know what to do with all this free time! i may email some bio profs and see if i can volunteer in a lab or something.
i then went to the gym after bio, and came back here and had lunch with the usual 3 girls as well as courtney, who is also from the us and made friends with kendall while we were gone, and praveen, one of the ra's who i always say hi to (he's actually the only ra i know, and is not mine).
now i'm going to go switch my classes and do some other errands, hopefully it won't start raining again, since it was pouring earlier. ha ha fun fact, karen just imed me and said it's 63 there, which is exactly what my widget says it is here. pretty impressive for early march!
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