01/02/2018 - first day at university

Today was the first day at my host university (UCSYD). Like many buildings here, the university looks the same from the outside. There are a lot of brick houses that I really like :-)

Because the local students are currently on internships, we are pretty much the only ones at the university, which is actually pretty cool because we have the whole building to ourselves.

So we went to our 'meeting room' and put on name tags right at the beginning. Then all the Erasmus students arrived and the first introduction took place. There are a total of 28 of us, with almost half of them coming from Belgium.

Germany: Pia, Wiebke
Spain: Rebeca, Alicia
Isle of Man: Jen, Keren
Switzerland (German): Julia, Fabienne
Switzerland (French): Ellie, Romain, Brenda, Mai-Ly
Belgium (Dutch): Charlotte, Astrid, Lisa, Pascal, Evy, Sofie, Katoo
Belgium (French): Adi, Anne, Christine, Emily
Japan: Aoi
Austria: Teresa, Katharina, Sophia, and me

Soon, our professors also arrived and introduced themselves to us. (Jette, Lars, Anne, Iben, ...)
What I immediately noticed is that there are no formalities here. The professors are addressed by their first names and there is no sense of hierarchy. There is more or less a friendly relationship between the professor and the student, which I think is great :-)

As a little welcome gift, each Erasmus student received a bag from the university. (Plastic bottle, notebook, pen, candy, small folder). We also had free bread rolls, cheese, vegetables, fruit, tea, and coffee :-)

We played a few icebreaker games to introduce ourselves to each other and heard some facts about our courses here and discussed important things. Then we took a campus tour and had our pictures taken for our student cards. We also had to register on the university platform (it's learning). This is essentially the communication between professors and students. You can find the calendar, schedules for each day, as well as our assignments, etc.

An international student (Sandra) then introduced us to ESN (Erasmus Student Network). This network organizes some events for Erasmus students, such as the 'Welcome Party', which will take place on Friday.
With the ESN card (50 DKK) there are some discounts and benefits for trips, flights, hostels, Flixbus. Of course, I bought it :-)

After the first day at university, we (almost all the Erasmus people) went into town. We walked through Flying Tiger and then sat down in the Irish Pub right next to it and had our first beer. (Fuglsang)

Then I just went home, cooked dinner, and entered my appointments into the calendar.

Summary of the first day: super nice students and professors. I'm looking forward to the coming time :-)