Spring semester is ending – it is celebration time for most of the students in Chapel Hill. The streets are more crowded than ever and there is a fusion of music sounds and barbecue “perfume” coming everywhere from little celebrations on student’s residencies. The weather also seems to be welcoming the holidays, a bright sun shines almost every day.
However, the diversity of purposes and programs that Chapel Hill University incorporates makes some celebrating the end of a study year and others welcoming and engaging new courses and opportunities – for the majority of graduate students it is time to continue the research and to restart learning.
UNC academic year is mainly composed by a fall semester – between August 22 and December 20 – and by a spring semester – between January 8 and May 9. But, when you think there is nothing new until next year, “here comes the sun”… new and rich opportunities of learning with summer sessions. Between May and July UNC students can attend all kind of courses in the first and second summer sessions.
Between all of this, here we are, two international students from GEDS program walking on the crowded campus, finishing some courses and starting others. The agreement established between European and US Universities opens all tracks that we might want to take – you can freely attend the courses that better fit your interests. The variety of choices and the flexibility to accomplish them is really promissory for you to return back home with a “double size” of knowledge. As my home university supervisor uses to say, it is just the right time to get the bag full of experiences to later reflect and integrate all of them. On the directory of classes of UNC website www.unc.edu/clsched you can find the available courses on each semester and summer session.
From this general picture, we would like to “zoom in” one outstanding piece: the conclusion of our course “Communicating in the American University Classroom”. This course focused on topics necessary for effective interaction in the American classroom and it is part of the Preparing International Teaching Assistants Program. In this last three weeks we have been engaged on microteaching experiences. We had to face particular challenges like accomplishing tasks as defining a term, explaining a visual or teaching a process and presenting these to the audience. These presentations were videotaped and commented by the instructors and colleagues. This brought us brand new ways of disseminating and expressing knowledge, which is a precious part of the research job.
“Zooming out” from this piece, here we are again among thousands of students circulating 24 hours between UNC´s libraries. Carolina´s libraries are distributed across campus in more than a dozen locations. Among Davis, Wilson and Undergraduate Libraries you have a lot of students engaged on their goals.
All this diversity on life tracks and goals seems to be the basis of a common feeling of happiness to be part of this student community.
