After a month of feeling like I’d been forgetting about something, this past week finally yielded the answer: school. While our friends back home began their semester before we’d even left, October 4th marked the first day of our classes, and the University of Nottingham could not be more different than our home at Luther. 

Coming from a college of 1,800 people on 200 acres, it’s hard to grasp the sheer vastness of the University. Around 48,000 students are spread across eight campuses, and 34,000 of those are located on the six campuses in Nottingham. Of those six, the University Park Campus is the largest at 300 acres. Most of us in the Nottingham program attend our classes there, though some attend the much-smaller Jubilee Campus that focuses on computer science and business management.

Aside from the campuses themselves, there’s still a great deal of change to weigh in our heads. To start with, while I could roll out of bed twenty minutes before class and make it with time to spare, the commute to class entails a 45-minute bus ride along with a bus line switch as well. Those classes don’t take place in intimate, personal settings of 16-20 students either; instead, a large lecture hall with 150 students is the norm. To mitigate this, we attend 20-person seminars run by other faculty members, allowing for more interactive, in-depth discussions like back at Luther. 

The biggest change by far that each of us in the Nottingham program has expressed at one point, however, is the ever-present feeling that we are outsiders. We came from dorms on a residential campus where we were surrounded by friends and could walk anywhere on campus in ten minutes. Between online courses and large lecture halls, it’s not the most conducive environment for meeting new people, but the seminars and endless amount of clubs and societies to join more than make up for it. Often times, our very-foreign accents ignite conversations with curious British students who are more than eager to ask questions about America or even just have us pronounce words for them. In any case, we’re slowly, but surely, assimilating well and finding our own places in our new homes - but there will be more on that in the upcoming blogs!

For now, I’m off for more adventures,

Max