Horns meet world. World meet Xochitl Butcher. Xochitl is a Biochemistry major at UT Austin, but she’s spending her 2015 Fall semester in Denmark on the University of Copenhagen exchange program. Luckily for us, Xochitl has been logging her experience on a blog: Xochitl Abroad. Below is just a glimpse of her extensive blog where Xochitl explains how the first week of classes in Copenhagen went.
I finished my first week of class! And for me, a “week” is just 3 days–Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I am taking 3 different classes, and they each meet for 2 or 3 hours, so it feels quite long.
Even though I’m a biochemistry student at UT, I am interested in Public Health, and the University of Copenhagen has a great Public Health Master’s program. When signing up for classes I was given the option of signing up for master level classes…so I did. My first class has only 15 people in it… much different than UT! It is titled “Body and Technology.” We will be discussing medical enhancement technologies and other biomedical advances, like prosthetics, and their implications on health. There are two of us working on our bachelor’s in our home country. The rest of the students are probably between 25-40 years old. It should be interesting because most of the students have lots of experience in the field.
I am taking a Danish culture course where we will be learning lots of history. There are 4 or 5 excursions planned throughout the semester to go see what we study. The class is all international students and is in a lecture hall with around 70 other students. My third class is called “Psycho-Physiological Responses, Disease and Social Stressors.” Most weeks we have a new guest lecturer for the first hour of the class. This week was a lecturer from Sweden, who spoke about the different Health Models and the meaning of Health. This lecture was extremely similar to a class I just finished at UT last semester, so it was nice to hear familiar topics. There was a lot of biochemistry incorporated into the lecture, so I enjoyed that.
There are many different campuses belonging to the University scattered around the city. I have class at 2 different ones– one at a very modern site not too far from where I live, and the two Public Health courses are at an older site closer to the city center.
The formats of the classes are very lax. No stress of tests or quizzes–at least for a while. One class has a final test, and one a final paper. Other than that, nothing tested during the semester. It is the student’s responsibility to read in order to contribute to discussion. I like it so far, I’m just not used to reading so much!
If you enjoyed reading about Xochitl’s experience with her classes, then check out her blog because she has MANY other adventures already posted and she’s only about halfway through her semester abroad, so there will surely be more to come.
What’s up everyone, it’s my first visit at this website, and article is actually fruitful designed for me, keep up posting these
types of content.