Two days left until I leave! I feel like procrastinating a bit so I'm going to go ahead and post my second blog entry. This entry is meant to give a little bit of info about where I'm going, what I'll be studying, and what I intend to do after classes.
As for where, I'm going to the University of Groningen, which is in the city of Groningen, which is in the providence of Groningen in the Netherlands. Now, I will not be in Holland except for when arriving in the country and whatever trips I decide to take there. I know the Holland/Netherlands difference can be a bit confusing, but here's a video explaining it, as well explaining the other wacky technicalities of The Kingdom of The Netherlands.
Specifically, I will be staying in the international house Kornoeljestraat 2 (I'm pretty sure the 2 is the street address). This house (more like a hotel, it's 13 stories tall!) is located closer to my classes than the city center, but it still looks like I can get there by bike in under half an hour. I'm pretty excited to be living in an international house, this will expose me to all sorts of different cultures from people around the world! Language might be a slight barrier, but it seems that everyone will know at least a basic amount of English as it is required by the university for acceptance in to the exchange program.
What I'll be doing is studying (during the semester). I'm enrolled as an Artificial Intelligence major, my curriculum most closely resembles a 3rd year AI major focusing on Cognitive Science (Note: the entire undergrad degree for this program only takes 3 years). The RUG semesters are split in to quarters and for each quarter I'm currently going to take 1 undergrad class, 1 grad class, and research. Those classes are: Quarter 1: Cognition and Attention (undergrad), User Models (grad). Quarter 2: Cognitive Neuroscience (undergrad), Neuro-Ergonomics (grad). Now, I'm signed up for these classes but they aren't set in stone, so we'll see if that's what I actually end up taking. For my research it should mostly be cognitive testing and modeling, much like what I do at RPI.
Now for "when". I'm leaving the states on the afternoon of Monday, January 14th. I'll be arriving in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Tuesday morning. Why so much time? Well, I'll be losing 6 hours due to time zones. That's right, the Netherlands are 6 hours ahead of the US eastern coast, fortunately that makes the math relatively easy when trying to figure out the relative time at both locations.
Right now I'm not sure when I'm coming back. I currently want to travel around Europe once the semester is over (mid June), but I still have to figure out where to go and who to go with. I will definitely be back in the states by the time classes start at RPI for the Fall 2013 semester, that is Monday, August 26th. That's 7 months! Right now I'm only planning to be over there for 6 months so I'll have some time in the states over summer, but we'll see how plans work out. I'll update here as I develop plans.
That should cover everything. Thanks for reading, now it's time for me to go finish packing!
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