<commit_before>---
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title: >-
  Life as an Erasmus Student: Week 1
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Well, I've made it to the Czech Republic. Something tells me this process should have been easier, but it wasn't.

It took a couple days for the jet lag to wear off. A 7.5 hour flight is not a comfortable one.

Instead of going with the dorms, I've decided to stay at an apartment.

On my third day in Prague I registered with the foreign police.

I missed out on most of the activities for orientation week, as they've all been reserved pretty quickly.
<commit_msg>Add more thoughts to EM article<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: >-
  Life as an Erasmus Mundus Student: Charles University in Prague, Semester 1
---

If I told myself a year ago that I would be studying for my Master's in Europe, I would think I was crazy. But many events have transpired since then.

Well, I've made it to the Czech Republic. Something tells me this process should have been easier, but it wasn't.

It took a couple days for the jet lag to wear off. A 7.5 hour flight is not a comfortable one.

Instead of going with the dorms, I've decided to stay at an apartment.

On my third day in Prague I registered with the foreign police. The people I met with were highly unprofessional.

I missed out on most of the activities for orientation week, as they've all been reserved pretty quickly.

Most of the classes for the first semester were compulsory. Data Structures I, Introduction to Complexity and Computability, Statistical Natural Language Processing I, General Linguistics, Natural Language Processing Technologies. I took one elective, Speech Recognition.

Two classes in particular were immensely challenging: Data Structures I and Introduction to Complexity and Computability. They were taught by the same instructor. His favorite word was "trivial". In fact, I tallied up the results at the end of each class, and this instructor has said the word more than 214 times over the course of 14 weeks.

The instructor's grading style was highly unorthodox. If your results were not correct or your implementation had a bug in it, he would mark down your grade as a 0 and have you redo the assignment and resubmit with a 10% penalty.

At the start of the exam period, a group of students attended a meeting with the Vice Dean to discuss many of the issues we've been having in the class. Many expressed concerns that his grading style was unpredictable a .

Exams were even more intense. For Data Structures, I got two questions that amounted to two short sentences that amounted to, "Explain everything you know about this data structure." The resulting explanations took me 3 pages to fill from memory. No notes, just a pencil and paper and everything in your head. It was the hardest exam I've ever taken. All the other classes were a cakewalk in comparison. For the other classes, I studied maybe a day before in preparation, but for Data Structures and C&C, I had to spend two weeks of studying 4-5 hours each day to be comfortable to write out all the class material on a topic from memory.

Unfortunately, the items on the exam were questions that I understood the least.

One saving grace was that after the meeting, the exams were conducted with two instructors present, and they would both conduct the oral evaluation.

There's such a disparity in difficulty among first semester classes. On the one hand we're getting an introduction to Bash scripting, Python, text processing, and on the other hand we're proving the amortized complexity of a Fibonacci Heap using probability theory. The jump in difficulty is massive.

In the end, was it worth it? I think so. It has been such a challenge, but I've lived my life pursuing challenges. I have learned so much being independent in a foreign country.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was <NAME>, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
—Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar

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