I’m one and a half weeks into being a full-time student at the University of Düsseldorf, and by now the flood of information is gradually turning into an array of observations. I’m constantly torn between being both intimidated and unchallenged by the workload. Everyone who has caught a glimpse of my schedule has exclaimed “Wow, that’s A LOT of courses!”. For me it seems very little, considering that I’m very much used to a 9am to 6pm schedule every day. Now I only have two such days, with one day ending at 4pm and the other two at 2pm (AND 2 of those have idle time in between). I should probably mention that half of my schedule consists of tutorials, and on top of that I have two just-for-fun courses. My actual required courses would easily have fitted into only two 8:30am to 6pm days.

I’m majoring in English and minoring in Linguistics. Naturally there are some more and some less interesting courses, but unfortunately I won’t get around doing all the less interesting ones because they’re required. I haven’t really decided yet which I find most interesting… Medieval English seems like a good candidate. Language Skills have completely unchallenged me in the last two lessons, whereas Syntax seems all a bit dry. A lot probably depends on the lecturer. All my native English speaking lecturers seem most interesting so far, but you can never tell what they are from their names.

With nearly 20.000 students, 5000 of them first-years, the University of Düsseldorf is not small at all. That fact is very noticeable when it comes to the social aspect. I can safely say that I have not made any friends at Uni after my first 1 1/2 weeks – and what is probably more striking, I seriously don’t care. Being the usually rather silent observer that I am, I keep noticing that my mindset clashes with that of all those young and inexperienced fresh-out-of-high-school kids. A lot of them don’t seem to be very interested in studying and rather spent the seminar whispering with their neighbor. Another considerable chunk of (especially female) students doesn’t go anywhere without their group of 1-3 friends and will start a terrible tantrum when threatened of being separated (e.g. because a course is overfilled). When I see things like that, I’m very happy that I have my independence from social obligations. I go to the mensa, the library or the restroom whenever I please and don’t waste precious time waiting for someone to agree, decide, whatever.

Time is indeed precious in these first couple of weeks, because most of my courses are massively overbooked. Sometimes being 30 minutes early will already be too late to get a seat, and there’s one course in a huge auditorium where still a lot of people have to sit on the stairs. So far I’ve been lucky because I’ve always been very early.

But back to the social aspects of Uni life; I think my value of independence comes from my experience of school life in the past. I’ve been through the phase where “friends” have morally dragged me into an abyss, out of which I only climbed up again by repeating the school year. Now, 7 years later (which include 3 years of working hard for my money), I’m much more aware of what’s at stake and what I’m missing in the world of pay checks.

I also don’t share the common problem of my fellow students; being new in town and having to built up a social life from scratch. Been there, done that, and I’m quite happy with the (limited, but good) social life I have in Düsseldorf. I might even make some new friends at Uni, but I daresay I can afford to be very picky.