English Challenges

This is my last entry in this blog because I doubt I’ll keep using this at some point of my life and in this blog I’m going to talk about my english language challenges during this semester. To be honest the most difficult thing to do was going to class because I live so far away from Uni that sometimes I couldn’t make it in time and I was afraid to interrupt the class, but besides that, I think I’m good, I mean I already knew English stuff, I think I can write it and understand it in a good way but I can’t pronounce it, but I think that’s just practice? Because I don’t speak English in my daily rutine but I listen a lot of English music and I read a lot of stuff written on English and maybe that’s why I can write it and understand it and not speak it, because I haven’t development that ability. The blogs were fine, I mean I got a little bored talking about my career in most of the post but I enjoy it and it was easy to me? Well. My experience in Uni was fine, I made all the tasks and I tried to assist on a weekly basis to class, I think it’s good we can learn here English because it’s really helpful when you are in Uni because you have to write emails in English or read papers in English and it’s a great opportunity. I was lucky that I grew up in an environment where English music and movies in English were important so this class wasn’t really difficult to me because I already knew some stuff. Nowadays English is really important to me because 99% of the music that I like is in English and I’m a big fan of meeting the bands when they came to Chile so obviously I need to know English because I need to interact with them, also I use it to my career, I need to read investigations in English or watch some documentaries and it is really helpful to understand English language when you can’t find subtitles, so I’m grateful for this uni course because I learned knew words and better ways to say things. 

Changes in my study program

So like I’ve said in my previous posts, I’m studying psychology. I’m in my third year, in 2018 I’ll be (hopefully) in my fourth year so I’m going to talk about changes I’ll do until this point of my career because that’s what I’ve experienced so far. I really like the curriculum because you have a lot of social course and a bunch of “biologic” courses too but I don’t think we have enough “practical” courses because until third year you have one or two classes with practical activities but almost every course is theoric and I’m afraid that my fourth year is going to be like “hey this is a real person with real problems I know you haven’t had the opportunity to ‘practice’ everything you know but now help this person”. About the workload, the first two years were terrible but I’m not sure if my experience was bad because I have a poor timing to do thing and I don’t know how schedule stuff or in reality we had a lot of things to do. Well, about the faculty facilities, as you can see we barely have classrooms, some semesters to have class we had to use classrooms in another faculties, and you see the new building but it is only to post graduate students, so we keep being 80 students in classrooms for 30 students. About the use of technology, the only time I can use a computer in the Uni is in English class, because this faculty has so many students that spaces like library or computation rooms are always full of people so you can’t really use one unless you have a lot of patience. I don’t really have comments about the teaching methods because I’m aware that every professor has their own way to teach stuff according to the field they are working for, and if I had comments probably the faculty wouldn’t listen because in some past semesters my generation had some problems with some teachers or the students that assist those teachers and never listen to us. Anyways as you can see I have a lot of say about the changes in my program but I swear I don’t complain because I never thought I’ll be attending to Uni when I was younger so I’m kinda grateful for the opportunity but that doesn’t quit that we need better things to study.

Summer Holidays

In this post I’m going to talk about my summer holidays. I don’t really have plans because I don’t like to go out a lot in summer because I hate the summer, I hate the heat waves, I hate the hot air and I don’t tolerate the sun, like… when you’re cold, cool just put gloves and a jacket on and you’re okay, but what do you can do when it’s 35°C outside? RIP YOUR SKING OFF?? But I think I’m going to Valle del Elqui. I’m not going in a “vacations mood” because that’s where I live or used to live (I’m not sure because I spent more time in Santiago) so I know all the places like I know the back of my hand and that’s all. Like every year probably I’ll go with my family and there we are going to the beach in La Serena o Coquimbo or maybe to the little towns in the way to the Argentina and Chile frontier. We don’t do that much because we are so used to Valle del Elqui, I think we already know everything there? But maybe this year we are going  to Vallenar  or maybe to Salamanca because my grandparents bought a house there so we need to go there to know the place. To be honest I don’t know what I’m going to do because this is the first year that I’m not stuck in Uni until January because a strike so I have a lot of free time and I just wanna sleep and watch Tv shows all day. Anyways, if any of you is going to Valle del Elqui, I promise is not boring and there's a lot of activities to do, like going to the observatories, or going to the little beaches in Coquimbo or La Serena, or going in a roadtrip to Argentina, knowing a lot of little towns there, it's just I've been there for twenty years and I can't think to anything new to do.