School has started.

In a flash the first week of school has passed, and lessons have started going at a pretty good pace, not at a frenetic one yet. Key word, yet. But I've been enjoying my lessons here at UCLA. Campus life is really vibrant, and there are lots of activities to do here, and the place is bustling, yet, its quite a different ball game in the classrooms. Most students here take 3 modules per quarter, which is the full workload, so there are a host of student opportunities and jobs at UCLA. It's almost as if the whole campus is run by students, from parking attendents, store cashiers, dishwashers, to the jobs more commonly associated with college life like research or lab assistants.

Four out of five of the modules I'm taking at UCLA, the professors are not putting up powerpoint slides for their lectures. They like the trusty blackboard and chalk, whiteboard and marker, or just the sound of their own voice interspersed with videos, OHT's and other teaching aids. Just not the fancy stuff that we NUS students have come to expect. The good thing is that the lecture is not a continuous, constant droning of points of information that students must rigorously take down. Everything that the Prof says is packed full of information and thinking that we have to do in order to digest and translate that information into the larger scheme of the topic that he is lecturing about. Of course, this is aided by the topical points that they provide, but largely, the teaching style is something that we are used to in secondary school or JC, with a much more difficult content. And it is true that students here are more vocal, and fire off questions in the middle of the lectures. My psychology and law class professor has actually been in court, on trial, cross-examined by countless attornies serving as an expert witness on cases. He has also managed to invite several luminaries in the field of the judiciary and law enforcement who have participated in high profile cases to share their insights in the field of Psychology and Law.

But studying is not all about the books and lectures, and it is quite interesting when there's a break between one lesson and the next. Instead of just hanging out at the canteen or computer lab or with friends back at NUS, I'm sprawled on the carpet lawn, enjoying the cool breeze, reading a book, and I am visited by a squirrel gnawing at a nut just right next to me.

I could really enjoy this.