Jan 6: SOAS Orientation

Today was a good day. After a wonderful and fulfilling sleep, I awoke and met up with fellow SOAS Students to go to our Orientation down on main campus in Russell (Brandt) Square, which is about 15 minutes on-foot from our housing in Dinwiddy. I would normally be irritated with having to walk a little longer to class, but London is really too much fun to walk around in to mind. In other words, I'm sure I'll complain about it by next week. I won't bore you with the logistics of orientation day, but I will share something I found quite interesting (until it was explained, but it still looks funny on paper....just look:

No wonder that accent sounds so intelligent.

This is how I think. On paper.

This, as you can imagine, got me excited at the prospect of straight As this semester. However, there is a catch - nobody gets above a 75 nearly ever. So...there really isn't a difference. Why this is the system? I don't know. Is it to artificially keep self-esteem lower? If so, I don't really mind it, we really can get carried away with grade inflation in the States. But then, of course, if a 70 is A worthy, why not make it on more reasonable scale? Like 50? Ok, I'll stop. This will never make sense, but it deserved a rant of its own.

My task for the rest of the week is to go to courses and decide which 4 I want to take. I narrowed it down to 5, one which I will choose not to select by Friday's deadline. Here they are with linked descriptions in case you were curious:

Violence, Identity, & Politics in Modern East and Northeast Africa
Economic Development of Africa
Economics of Developing Countries I 
Banking and Finance in Economic Development
Advanced Economic Analysis

I'll take Greasy Pizza & Krispy Kremes for $200, Alex.

So I will attend all of these once this week, and then select my favorite 4 by Friday. Hopefully it won't be to difficult to pick which one to drop.


It was nice to finally meet some of the other students and get the ball rolling with my studies here. To celebrate our hard work of course "shopping" (as they call it here), Katie and I got pizza and wings from Royal Pizza around the corner and watched some NFL Playoff football. It's currently 14-13 Washington at the half...I don't have a horse in this race but it would be nice to see the Redskins win, if only because during my lifetime they have won a grand total of 3 playoff games. Nobody deserves that.

That's basically it for now. Cheers!