Getting My Bear-ings

This first week of classes has been filled with lots of adventures, new friends, and of course: boring syllabi lectures. As a part of orientation, the university hosted a bunch of fun events for the new/exchange students to participate in like, whale-watching, a downtown excursion, movie night, and s’mores. My favorite part was the whale watching of course– we got to see so many of them, and I took some pretty cool pictures! Aside from those activities, my roommates and our other friends have been hanging out a lot. We’ve gone on hikes, jumped into the freezing lake (a mandatory experience at UAS apparently), visited a few coffee shops, taken lots of goofy pictures, and are even planning to go camping this weekend.

Now for the boring syllabi lectures… I actually have really enjoyed going to this first week of classes. At my home school, I usually always have a problem with at least one of my classes and have to switch around my entire schedule, but I feel like I couldn’t have picked better classes to take here. The most difficult one so far is my Sustainable Resource Management course purely because of how many assignments we have throughout the semester, but a ton of my friends are taking it with me, so at least we’ll be drowning in homework together! My favorite class right now is Northwest Coast Carving– we’re currently making a soapberry spoon with Native Alaskan designs on it. The sharp tools are a little scary, but it's so fun to participate in art and learn about native history simultaneously. I’ll keep this post brief since it’s mostly about getting settled in and my first impressions on my classes, but I’ll definitely have more to say next week since we’ll get started on the actual material.