With this mug, you can feel like a proper BI student! :P No, just kidding. It's actually for refills of coffee or tea at one of BI's cafés (not Starbucks, the other one). You can use this cup instead of throwaway cups, which is extremely environmentally friendly. AND, which might be the more relevant reason in a country like Norway, you get a lot of coffee or tea for 10 NOK, which is basically half price! Oh, and as you can see, it has a BI logo on it. So I might just take this mug home as a souvenir, instead of getting an overpriced BI hoodie...
Second, let me comment on the weather. There was a lot of snow this week. "a lot", meaning: Oslo's public transport got into trouble. If Oslo's public transport app informs you about "major disruptions" and advises you to plan extra time for your journey - only in Norwegian though, which was a bit unfortunate for some people -, then you know it's serious. Not that I was surprised. When I made my way through the student village to the metro, I wanted to dispose of some waste. But I had a bit of trouble with the big waste container, because it looked like this:
(Not sure if you can tell from the photo, but: these containers are actually large, almost 1.5m tall, I'd guess. So you can imagine how many cm of snow were on the lid. Anyway, I kept on walking until I reached another one that somebody else had already freed from snow not too long ago.)
And then, the street leading to the T-bane station looked like this:
Conveniently, the metro was still running, maybe with a bit of delay, but running for sure. Lots of busses, however, did not run or got stuck somewhere on the way. So the people living fairly close to school had to walk there, while others did not make it to BI at all. But yeah, snow en masse seems to be at least a bit of an excuse to be late for your class.
As already mentioned, the official first week of classes was already last week. However, since all of my courses only started (or will start) later, I only had my personal first week of classes this week. At the beginning of this week, to be precise.
So this week, I had Change Management, Managing Workplace Diversity - and again, Norwegian Culture & History in between, just for fun. But it seems like it's fairly standard here to have a bunch of "mandatory" and then even more "recommended" reading. Sometimes, a whole coursebook is part of the mandatory reading... But unlike the University of Mannheim, BI does not have a coursebook collection as a part of their library where you could get these books for four weeks and then exchange them for other copies (that's how it usually works in Mannheim). Instead, they actually seem to expect you to buy these textbooks! Already in last week's session of Norwegian Culture & History, the teacher told us, "You need to buy this book!" And in the first session of Managing Workplace Diversity, the teacher was like, "Has anyone not bought the book yet?" Fortunately, it was a quite big lecture hall, so she couldn't ask everybody personally...
Not only the buying culture, also the reading culture (not that the latter was something bad!) surprised me a bit. For my first session of Change Management, I had kind of expected an introduction to the topic. Instead, the teacher jumped right into the topic and started talking about the three papers we were supposed to have read - in our holidays. Guess who had not read the texts? Correct, the exchange students...! And guess how much I understood of what he was talking about? Correct, not so much... :P
Another aspect that is different from what I know from my home university: participation! In Mannheim, you usually just go to lecture and listen to the professor. Here, however, participation is expected and required - and it's actually graded and counts into your final result (up to 50% of the grade in some courses, if I'm not mistaken). So that means, you should not miss too many classes...
And yet another point: group work! In both of the first sessions, we were either divided into groups or asked to form our own group. In these groups, we were sent out to do some group work. "out" as in: leave the classroom and find some working space where you can answer the questions you were given. If you have to present, discuss or submit the results afterwards depends on the course and/or the situation, I guess.
So much for the academical part of the week. (I did do a bit of reading for next week's classes, but I'm not gonna bore you with that.)
On Wednesday, BI's Exchange Fair for their own students took place. As I (surprise, surprise!) didn't have classes on Wednesday, I had signed up to volunteer during the whole event. So I spent most of the day standing/sitting behind a huge table full of info material and merchandise of all German universities and schools BI has some sort of contract with (some of them were not even permanent partner schools) - telling people how great Mannheim university is. The girl who was with me most of the time did the same for Frankfurt School of Finance. Because how were we supposed to answer questions like, "How is studying at the technical university of Berlin?" or "What's the best German school to go on exchange if I'm specialising in Strategy?" So basically, when people asked about Finance, they got Frankfurt; when they asked about Marketing or Management, they got Mannheim. As for the rest: there's just so many German schools! Germany was actually the only country that got its own desk (and it was a huge desk), all the other countries seemed to share with at least one country. Austria even shared with three others!
On Thursday, there was the "Recruitment Day" for BI's societies. Other universities, like Maynooth in my bachelor Erasmus semester, would just call this event "Societies Day", but nope, BI's societies are recruiting. :P And since it's a business school, there were so many business-related societies - to be found here! (I always thought Mannheim had a bunch of them, but yeah, it's all a question of the perspective, I assume. Yup, they also have a stock exchange society. It's called Børsgruppen Aktie. :D) But there were also some sporting societies as well as free-time societies (social, culture, international).
After the recruitment fair, we didn't go to the after-party straight away. Instead, we made a small excursion to Blindern, the campus of the University of Oslo (BI's Oslo school rival; its business school rival is NHH in Bergen). There, ESN, the European Student Network, held an introduction event. First, a guy gave us a presentation on his two home countries: Norway & Ireland. As you can imagine, I loved the combination! <3
Afterwards, we got an introduction to ESN Oslo's events for exchange students. They are open to all international students from different schools in Oslo, so that's quite cool! Oh, and do you know what else was very cool? They had free snacks at the event!
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