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Oriented
August 25, 2005 ( grad )
So, today was the big grad orientation!
Lots of info, greetings, people!
The morning was mostly intro-to-the-Elliott School, who's the staff/directors, the Library system (I like the librarian, he's into neologisms. He promised to "de-google-ize" us with "bibliotherapy". [1]
The noon hour was devoted to language diagnostics, which the International Science/Tech Policy (ISTP) people like myself are immune from. I almost took the Spanish exam anyhow, but it was a 30 min wait for a 40 min test, then scheduling a 15 min oral later... I opted for lunch and getting my student ID and library cards instead. I can always take the diagnostic during registration in October for the spring semester, or next fall, if for whatever reason I need it. Evidentally the Spanish diagnostic requires a lot of writing, and that's probably my lowest skill in Spanish right now. Maybe if I spent some time in Nicaragua over the summer doing IT-in-development field work, I could manage something (sadly, to get course credit for anything at GWU, you have to pay GWU tuition costs, the price of which is probably twice the amount I'd spend on airfare, food, and housing for a month in Nica).
I found all this detail out during the study abroad section. There are two semster-long programs that are interesting, one in Paris, one in Maastricht, Netherlands, and a summer program in Panama with USAID on a tourism-development project. I hope to take advantage of at least one of these programs, though I don't know what that will do with my job. They're very flexible, but they do need someone on-site who is familiar with their systems. I'll work with them as I learn more about these programs, their costs, value, and so on.
After that was the break-out with the individual programs. The bread and butter of the Elliott School is their International Affairs program, which has to have a hundered or so students in it. The ISTP program this year has 14 grad students, and Intl Dev group, which I also hope to work with some, has 25 or so. Which means we're small, but the faculty to student ratio is like 4:1 in the overall program.
At the end of the day was the student services fair, which was mostly stuff I'd already figured out the hard way, thanks, and a welcome BBQ for the entire GW grad class. The lines were insanely long, but I ended up getting to talk to people in other random programs that GW offers, so that was nice after being bottled up with the policy folks all day :)
Post-BBQ, the Elliott School grad students had a happy hour nearby (there's a Thursday Night Out, TNO, tradition... Annoying, as I don't have classes at GW on Thus this semester, but the timing could work if I work an hour later of Thus and come up afterward....) That was fun, but super-crowded, and my social batteries for the day were nearing empty, so I had a last-call of happy hour beer ($2 for a frickin' Miller Lite.... this town has no love for beer!), chatted for a bit with a fellow RPCV, and wandered homewards.
I think that's it! TIRED!
[1] DAMNIT I hate the "correct" grammar on placing punctuation inside quotes. It's so structurally backwards that it's not even funny!
Posted by griffjon at August 25, 2005 08:18 PM
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