Humdrum, getting closer?

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.