Going to Class in a Classless Society

The first week of real classes is behind me now—long enough to pass on some first impressions.

The first significant change for me is probably the pace. I'm only taking three classes, but they only last for 6 weeks, so after this first week things are set to start happening pretty quickly. There isn't really enough time in the period to set a bunch of homework assignments, so instead the general model seems to be that each class sets a small handful of projects, maybe as few as two or three. The strange thing is that there isn't a single final grade issued for each class; instead you get a different grade for each component, each with a different weight. For example, in a class worth 7.5 credits, you may get 4.5 credits for passing the exam, and another 3 credits for passing the homework. To pass the class, you have to pass each element individually. Grades are issued on a scale of U, 3, 4, 5, where a U is a failing grade and the rest indicate passing (there used to be a 1 and a 2, both failing, as well as a 6 and a 7 for people who did too much).

I already mentioned the oddness of the class schedules, and after a week it seems no less odd to me. Beyond just meeting at different times each week, one of my classes is scheduled to meet in a different room pretty much every single time it meets for the whole 6 weeks. On the plus side, that one class should give me a pretty thorough overview of the Polacksbacken campus, but I don't know how I'm ever going to remember where/when I'm supposed to be.

With the exception of one class intended solely for new international students, my classes are composed of about 1/3 foreign students and 2/3 Swedish students. While a handful of the Chinese students are women, the Swedes are a unilaterally scruffy-looking bunch of men. They speak English to the professors, but Swedish to each other, and they've all obviously been taking classes together for years. As yet only one guy has shown up for class in his bright red coveralls, though. There are also a handful of undergrad exchange students in the department, but the only ones I know of in my classes are a couple of Frenchmen (don't even get me started on that).

While the buildings at Polacksbacken are mostly barracks built in the 18th century, the insides have been redone within the last decade. Actually, the old military nature of the buildings is if anything a hindrance to the IT department, as reinforced walls don't cooperate well with wireless networks. The rooms I've been in so far are mostly decent lecture halls, but nothing really fancy. The only truly odd feature is that every single classroom has a sink and a mirror in one of the front corners. A way for lecturers to literally wash their hands of their students after a class? I've no idea.

That's it for now. More weirdness as it occurs.

Some years we forget to burn the goat…

As with the start of any school year, much of my first couple of weeks have been spent dealing with administrative necessities. This being Uppsala, however, at least one of these was new to me: the need to pick a nation. We've mentioned the nations before: student organizations which correspond to various areas of Sweden. What we may not have mentioned before is the fact that membership in a nation is obligatory for students at Uppsala. In fact, when you show up to take your final exam for each class, you are required to show proof of your membership in some nation or another. So this week I had to decide what nation to join.

In the old days, students joined the nation named after the region they came from, but while some Swedish students still do that it's no longer required. Instead, people pick a nation based on some sort of shared interest. Most student groups are organized through the nations. If you want to play handball you join a nation with a handball team, if you want to sing you join a nation with a choir, and if you want to take cheap trips to Russia you join a nation that organizes cheap trips to Russia. With something of a war on right now, the only one of those things I might have wanted to do suddenly seems less appealing, so I needed some other criterion. Last week there was a sort of fair where all the nations set up booths, which I attended, and I did learn things about some of the nations there (Kalmar Nation has the biggest dance club, Värmlands Nation takes the most trips, Norrlands Nation has the most members, Stockholm Nation is the most stuck up), but nothing that really clinched it for me.

In the end, I decided on Gästrike–Hälsinge Nation. Here's what sold me on it:

1. It has a name that's so funny the Swedes don't even say it, instead calling it GH Nation (which, in turn, sounds really funny to an American if you say it in Swedish).
2. One of the nations two home communes, Gästrike, includes the city of Gävle, home every Christmas season to the world's largest flame retardant straw goat.
3. While most if not all of the nations have pubs, GH is widely regarded as having the best, a cozy little third floor affair with 160 kinds of beer available. In a city where a pint glass of the nearly undrinkable local brew in one of the non-student bars will set you back 60 SEK, access to a good selection of reduced price beers is no small matter.
   

So this Tuesday night I went to GH Nation's Reccemottagning to get to know my nation a little better. When I got there I was placed in a group with four Swedes, and we were sent off with maybe a dozen or so other groups to find and answer a series of questions about the nation which had been strategically scattered about the building. Along the way we were introduced to several key members of the nation, such as Thor, the first curator. After explaining that GH was the second richest of Uppsala's nations (after Smålands Nation, and only because Smålands mistakenly received a large bequest last century and then "misplaced" the paperwork) he proceeded to pick up a small, straw goat. The conversation then went a little like this:

1Q: This is a bock. There's a bock every year at Christmas, and most years it burns.

Innocent New Member: It didn't burn this year, they soaked it in flame retardant.

1Q (vehemently): These little #@*!!*@s are soaked in it too, but they still burn.

stunned silence

1Q(quite calmly): Unless we forget to burn them. We meant to burn this one last year, but some years we forget to burn the bock.

After the group activity, it was up to dinner. This was a three course affair. We started with smoked eel in a cream sauce on a slice of pumpernickel, with a glass of beer. For the main course we had scallpoed potatoes, onion sauteed in a cream sauce, pickled beets, and a hamburger (no bun, mind you, just a hamburger patty), with red wine. Then for dessert, hazelnut ice cream surrounded by meringues, topped with whipped cream and some sort of grated nut (have I mentioned before that Sweden is the birthplace of lactose tolerance?) with coffee.

Sounds pretty straightforward, but actually it took nearly three and a half hours. Why? Because to Swedes it just isn't a dinner party without lots of singing. Every few minutes we all stopped what we were doing to sing a song, chosen seemingly at random from the GH Nation songbook, a 200+ page book of songs (mostly) in Swedish, copies of which were scattered about the tables. The only one I recognized was "What do you do with a drunken sailor?", but the others had titles that seemed to translate to things like, "Fat French Girls," "There's No More Moonshine," and "Why Am I Out Of Snus?". After each song we would drink a toast, raising a glass to the person to one side, then the other side, then across the table, then taking a drink, then raising the glass again to the person across the table, and then to each side. Several of the songs also involved banging loudly on the table or standing up on your chair or linking arms and swaying back and forth in unison.

After all that, the bicycle ride home seemed much longer than usual, but it gave me plenty of opportunity to ruminate, and by the end of it I was led to one inescapable conclusion: I've joined the Drones.

A welcome, of sorts

On Friday I attended a reception for new students at Universitetshuset. It wasn't exactly intended for me—there was another reception this week for International students, conducted in English. The one I went to was almost all in Swedish, but it was also a wee bit more of a shindig.

The schedule of events included a warning to be on time, so I showed up 45 minutes early. The building was already crawling with new students. There were also a couple dozen organizations that had set up tables to hand out junk and advertise their services. I got a lanyard from the student choir*, some cool little flashing led lights from one insurance company, and an ice cream treat from another. By the time I'd finished scalding my mouth with a cup of very strong coffee, the doors to the main room were opening.

The program itself lasted about an hour. There were a number of speakers, interleaved with performances by various student musical groups. The MC was some guy who did little magic tricks and told what I assume were jokes in Swedish. The only bit I understood went something like:

So, how do you like the ceiling here? Pretty nice, huh? Yes, it reminds me of my first student apartment.

The speakers, who all wore their gold chains of office, included the University Chancellor, the Mayor of Uppsala, a guy I assume must be the equivalent of the Student Body President, and the President of the United Nations. Don't get too excited about that last one, it wasn't Dag Hammarskjold back from the dead or anything; this United Nations is the governing council of the Student Nations at Uppsala.

And that was that.

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*a small correction by Jennifer: Joe's lanyard is from the student government, not the student choir (kår, not kör!).

Oriented!

Orientation week is over now, so I guess I must be acclimated to the new school now. I believe I left off after my first day, so here's the rest of the week in a nutshell:

Tuesday morning was devoted to a series of short presentations by a number of the professors in the department, giving overviews of the classes we would be most likely to sign up for. I have to say, I really like this approach. I don't think it changed my mind about any of the classes I wanted to take going in; however, there were a number of classes I didn't want to take, but sort of felt like I should take anyway, and after listening to the professors talk about those classes I can now confidently state that a stampeding herd of wild elk couldn't drag me into any one of them.

To actually register for classes requires meeting with an advisor, so we had the afternoon off while some of these meetings took place. Then it was back to Polacksbacken in the evening for the barbeque. The invite said there would be "food, soft drinks, salad, etc." The food in this case was sausage (mostly hotdogs) and chips, the salad was potato salad, and the soft drinks were just that (people were encouraged to bring their own beer and/or wine, but the U can't provide it). It lasted for about four hours, and it only rained consistantly (leaving us all huddling under the small tent) for the last 90 minutes of that. I did get to meet most of my fellow students, plus a couple of profs, and got a few questions answered in the process.

The incoming class consists of 36 students: one each from America, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Sweden; half a dozen from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent; and 2 dozen from China. I should add that not only am I the only American in my cohort, I'm actually the only American the IT department has had in a Masters program (although the international Masters in Computer Science has only been running for a few years—before 2004 or so, the department only offered a 5 year undergrad/Master combination degree for Swedish students). Anyway, they most seem a chatty, agreeable lot, and while the bulk of the Chinese students tend to group together and speak Chinese, it's hard to blame them since they are after all in the majority, and there were a number of Chinese students more than willing to buck the trend. Most of the students are new to the university, but a handful spent a semester or year here as exchange students while undergrads.

The party broke up after 9, and this is when I learned something new: the city forest, through which most of my path to and from school runs, takes on quite a different character on a cold, rainy night. It was, to put it succinctly, dark. Very dark. I was glad I'd been through it more in the preceding weeks, because otherwise I'm not sure I would have made it out before midnight. As it was, I only had to backtrack three or four times, and I exited the forest almost where I intended to wind up. I guess it's time to dig put that bike light I got in July.

Hmm, that was Tuesday, but not so much in a nutshell. Maybe I'll do better with Wednesday, which was devoted to practical concerns. Several of the topics discussed would have been useful to me in February, such as the advice about opening a bank account, which amounted to: go to any bank you like, except for the bank Joe and Jennifer chose (said the presenter: "May people have quite a good experience of them... but I've never met one."). Then we got key cards, computer passwords, and library cards, and a tour of the local campus area.

Immediately after the tour I had my meeting to sign up for classes. The class schedule is a little different ere from the sort of thing I'm used to. Instead of a firm schedule, the University only sets broad guidelines for when the semester starts and stops. Within that, each department can pretty much do as it likes. The computer science department divides the semester into two study periods, each about 6 weeks long. During each study period you take two or three classes. This meeting was to decide on classes for both periods this semester. It was pretty straightforward: I said what classes I'd like to take, and the advisor signed me up for them. He didn't check to see when they met, or even how many students were already enrolled, just signed me right up. I gather that new students just get into their classes regardless of enrollment, but I think there are limits set for older students.

The schedule thing is another story, though. You (or at least, I) would think that there would be a schedule that listed this class as meeting Tuesday and Thursday at such and such a time, and that class as meeting at another time, and so forth. It turns out you (really I this time) would be wrong. At Uppsala the classes meet at different times every week, and there's no expectation that you will be able to find two classes that never meet at the same time. My schedule doesn't conflict most of the time, but at least once per week I have a couple of lectures at the same time. What do I do when that happens? Just pick one and go to it, apparently. Professors don't appear to expect really high attendance rates, anyway. The schedule for the second period isn't even published yet, so there's no way for most people to know if the classes they registered for last week will meet at different times in November (both of my second period classes are taught by the same professor, so I suspect he won't double book himself).

After all that, Thursday was relatively uneventful. There was a meeting in the afternoon for all the foreign Master students at the University, although only about 100 out of 400 attended. The presenter offered commiseration at the lack of housing, confirmation that there is nowhere affordable to park in Uppsala, a warning that November is really grim ("…but if you make it through November, you'll be fine"), and an exhortation to eat plenty of hot vegetables at the cafeteria every day for lunch ("I know I sound like your mother, but your mother is right. Listen to your mother.").

This post is really quite long enough, so I think I'll stop there and let Friday be on its own. Anyway, for Friday there are pictures…

Sämsta sedan 1896

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing were the most disasterous games that Sweden has endured. Ever. Sure, they ended up with a total of 5 medals, 4 silver and 1 bronze, behind both Denmark and Norway (oh the shame of it!), but not a one of them gold. Finland? Finished with 4 medals... but one of them gold. Finland, for heaven's sake! (Sweden did manage to beat Iceland, who only managed one silver. Woo-hoo!)

Here's a list of some individual things that went wrong for Sweden, or are otherwise shameful in some way:

—Ara Abrahamian, the Greco-Roman wrestler who was a victim of knowing the rules better than the referee did. He should have wrestled in the gold medal match, but instead wrestled in the bronze match so that he could gave up his medal in protest. (The day after the closing ceremonies, the wrestling court ruled in his favor.)
—Susannah Kallur, a popular hurdler who was favored to win, hit the first hurdle in the semifinal race. She was interviewed by an SVT reporter immediately afterwards, and under continual pestering cried a little bit. "For heaven's sake, leave the poor woman alone!" I shouted at the TV. Turns out many other people did too: SVT got lots of angry mail, and the whole story headed the media for days. There were newspaper interviews how awful it was that a TV reporter made her cry, and then they interviewed Kallur's mother to ask how she felt about it, and then Kallur herself, and then the reporter, to ask him to defend himself... it was an amazing feeding frenzy, almost American in its scope.
—The women's soccer team left the tournament after their quarterfinal loss to current world champions Germany, who played badly in every game except against Sweden. And on a related note, while talking about the soccer tournament on the late-night wrap-up show, commentator Rickard Olsson said about Team Germany that it was hard to feel sorry for them, you know, after that whole Hitler thing. SVT is conducting an investigation...
—Carolina Klüft, apparently bored with years of dominating the heptathlon, entered only her worst events, triple jump and high jump, and did miserably.
—Stefan Holm, a known-to-be-prickly-and-perfectionist high jumper who just couldn't get it together.
—Sailing team Fredrik Lööf and Anders Ekström thought they were finishing in second place, but a judge said that they were in third place. The team only had a couple of minutes to lodge a protest, and since they thought they had finished second, they didn't. Their protest at not being able to file a protest is still underway, I think.
—Swimmer Therese Alshammar had a "wardrobe malfunction" right before her swim. (Link does not go to pictures!)
—Skeet shooter Håkan Dahlby, who shot the vey worst he ever has in a competition and was in tears afterwards.
—A Swedish taekwondo referee was kicked in the head (on purpose) by the Cuban he had just ruled against.

Swedish TV coverage was good. They did show lots of Swedish athletes, of course, but also showed finals and semifinals of event in which Sweden had no players/teams. There were no stories that I could tell of athletes overcoming hardships and "Doing it for their little brother Timmy, who has a deadly but heartwarming disease," as Wait! Wait! put it. On the other hand, post-hoc coverage of Sweden's failures was thorough and merciless.

One thing they did that I really liked was that in the early wrap-up each night, they had a biomechanist, a sports psychologist, and a practical philosopher (!) discussing the day's events, and often with a guest commentator as well to talk about about specific events. The ones we saw included boxing, wrestling, swimming (plus an explanation of how the suits work), diving, and most hilariously, the triple jump, featuring a slow motion re-enactor on wires.

So it's always a little sad when the Olympics is over—when else do you get to see so much handball?—but on the other hand, now we can get away from the TV and get back to work, school, and blogging...

Revenons à nos moutons

Today is the first day of orientation for the Datavetenskap Masters Program at Uppsala University, so this afternoon I returned to that sheep-strewn meadow. Up until a week ago, the only firm information that had been sent out about the program start was a note that there was a mandatory roll call on 25 August. Last Monday, this explanation was amended to include a time (13:15) and a place (building 1, room 211), with the promise that further information would show up during the course of the week at a web address, provided.

Needless to say, by last night, the web address was still not available. However, one of the returning students happened to mention on the program's message board that volunteers were needed for the tour of campus for the new students, as indicated on the orientation schedule, which was available at a completely different address. That site had not just a schedule of the week's activities, but also included an offhand mention of the fact that new students are required to bring their passport and a copy of their letter of admission to the roll call. Apparently, this past spring when the department informed us that on the first day we had to provide certified copies of previous diplomas and transcripts, they actually meant passports and letters of admission. Naturally.

Anyway, roll call was scheduled to run from 13:15 to 16:00 today. Since I had both of these items, roll call went off just fine. For me, anyway. For the half dozen or so erstwhile students of whom the department had no record, despite their letters of admission, it may have been a little bit rockier. Nevertheless, when the rest of us were dismissed at 14:00 (just a hair shy of the originally scheduled time, you may note) and told to go and enjoy the sunshine while it lasted, the program director seemed to think that everything would work out for everyone.

Tomorrow: Grillfest Tisdag!