Pyyvh.. So
I’m well into my third week at Uni. Starting to find my rhythm – which, for now,
is not fast enough to keep up with the demands from school though… Monday I was
doing homework for my epi class. It is a doctoral level course, so I have
expected it to be tough, but I spent also one hour just figuring out how to
open the statistical computer program – when your end goal is to make complex
survival analysis, you have a long way… So I went home frustrated and
discouraged. However, the next morning in class I learned that I was by far not
the only one, and after class 8-10 of us sat together, comparing syntax’es and
results and I had done the right things – I had just spent three times as much
time doing it than the others.. But I’ll get there, I’m sure!
I have
chosen all my courses now; I switched from one class to another and I switched
days for one course also, so my schedule looks like this:
Monday
Leadership and Effecting Change
Risk Analysis: Application to Risk-Based Decision-making
Tuesday
Advanced Epidemiological methods:
Applications
Thursday
Advanced Epidemiological methods:
Applications
Comparative Health Systems (only the first half of the semester)
Friday I’m
off B-D
From
mid-march I will be doing Epidemiology and Control of Infectious Diseases Mondays
and Wednesdays which I am looking very much forward to.
With my
Monday-morning class we have had lunch after class the two times we’ve been
there – hopefully it’s becoming a tradition. Apart from them, I have not been
bonding – like that – with the people
from my other classes. There is a lounge (the SPHere) for Public Health
students where I run into many of my class mates and we do chat; and as
mentioned we do homework-sessions in my epi class.
In my
Comparative Health System Denmark is the bomb. I took that class, partly
because learning how they do other places interests me a lot and partly because
the exam is a project on a health system in a country of your own choice and I
thought (I must admit) that I would have an easy time writing about Denmark.
However, two other people already fought about writing about Denmark before I
even had a say, so now the easier way out is not an option :-D It will be very
interesting, though, hearing about the Danish system from a foreigner’s perspective.
Yesterday Michael
and I went to our first Rovers meeting (Rovers are the group we went up north
with a couple of weekends ago, where we did cross country skiing, snowshoeing
and kite skiing…). A person was doing a presentation about his climb on a
glacier called Kautz Glacier at Mt Rainier (Washington). Interesting – I definitely
want to try ice climbing! Afterwards we had a beer (or rather, a glass of
water) at a pub nearby.
Thursday we
are going climbing in our gym, apparently they have a good wall for climbing.
This
weekend we are planning to go to Wisconsin Saturday morning to see the launch
of 40 air balloons at their Hot Baloon festival – hopefully we’ll be able to
get some got pictures.
