Day to day reality in York

Well, the route from Prague to Manchester wasn’t the luckiest one; however, we stayed for one night in an apartment of our friend from the Open Gate, who introduced us to the British culture and gave us some useful advice. Moreover, we joined his friends for a Bar Quiz, which provided us with the very first impressions of the student’s life in the UK, even before we reached York. Next day we took the free Uni coach from Manchester Airport directly to the Uni Campus, where we were welcomed by older students, who were supposed to help us with primary orientation. On our way to York, we have found out that Czech is still not dying, when we took a random chat about Prague with one Norwegian girl, who spoke Czech as well.

 Next week and half was purely introductory. Firstly only among international students, who were later joined by their British fellows. I must admit that we got to know people from all around the world and that we surely know someone from each continent, which was unimaginable for me till then. Except for many introductory talks, the Fresher’s Fair was held during that week, where students could sign up for hundreds of societies. So many people were interested in the Fair that even local security has to be present to prevent any grievances.

 Our lectures started after the Fresher’s week and we were actually looking forward to some kind of academic interaction in order to compensate our social life, which has been predominant so far. In my major Politics/Economics I have started to study modules like Introduction to Democratic Politics; Politics, Power and Society; Economics; Maths in Economics and Introduction to Statistical Theory. Moreover, I have taken for free an extra 38 lessons of foreign language. It becomes more obvious by now, that our academic skills, which we acquired during our IB studies, will pay off during the Uni study, which mainly consists of reading and essay writing. Evidently, we will have to try hard to retain the title of number 1 University according to the Times Higher Education 2010, but it’s definitely worth trying.