"So what year are you in?" "Um, how long have you got?"

Apparently I’m at university to study (it’s not all fun and games). I’ve just finished my first full week of lectures (or classes, as they’re called here), so I thought I’d talk a bit about my American education so far…

Perhaps my biggest anxiety about coming here was what the classes would be like compared with home. To explain that I will have to talk a bit about how the American University system works.

The first question I have to answer is, er, what year I’m in. You may have thought this was easy (just count how many years you’ve been at university..), but you’d be mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to the liberal arts system.

What this means that, unlike British universities where you apply for a specific subject, here you don’t have to decide that until you’re a way in to the course. Instead of concentrating on one subject to the exclusion of all others, students here will take a variety if courses form different areas. For example, if you want to major in physics there are a few physics courses you have to take in your first year, but you also have to take course in chemistry, maths and biology. To confuse things a bit more you can take second year subjects in your first year and vice versa, then do the same again with third and fourth year courses.

The end result of this is that it takes four years to get a degree here, as opposed to three years in the UK. This made picking what courses I should take somewhat tricky. I’m in my third year, which in the UK is the final year of the BSc, but here there is one year to go.

(Just to confuse things I’m on a four year course, but I’ll get an MPhys rather than a BSc, so it still doesn’t match the US system.)

To resolve this I took mostly final year courses, which leads to the cause of my anxiety- although I may have done as much (or more) physics as others on the course, I’m still behind a year at university. I was worried that the course would be too much of a jump in difficulty from what I’d done before.  

Well so far those fears have been rather unfounded. The courses aren’t too much of a jump, in fact I’d say that they’re hardly more advanced at all from what I did last year. The most advanced course, Atomic, Molecular and Condensed Matter Physics, is indeed tough, but nothing like the horror of quantum mechanics last year. I fully expect this to change, but at the moment I’ve become more worried about being behind when I get home!

The courses themselves are very different from British ones. They’re more structured internally, with set books and work to do between each lecture. However there’s far less of an overall pattern, with every professor organising the course how they want it. This contrasts Lancaster’s courses which all follow the same basic pattern. Which is better? Watch this space…

So those are my first impressions. The opinions expressed on the post are likely to be completely different in six months time.

A fair bit’s happened this week, so watch this space for more posts. If I have time and feel like writing, that is…