A Chilean Adventure

Marcelo said we’d need about a week to sign up for our classes and take care of all the other things required by the university. It seemed a little ridiculous that it would take that long since we can normally pick all of our classes for UW-Madison in a few afternoons. However, he was definitely correct in his estimate.

UW-Madison has an online course guide that allows you to see a description and the times of any classes you could possibly imagine and it’s all in one place on the website. UACh (Universidad Austral de Chile) has a much different system. From the moment a student enrolls in the university they have to declare a major and they start that specific plan of study with all the other freshmen in their major. Therefore, the website just has the semester-by-semester outline for each field of study. Since they don’t actually pick their classes, the website doesn’t give descriptions for many of them. They also don’t have schedules because most aren’t set until the first week of classes.

We also referenced a book of course offerings from 1996-97. We discovered that the book was helpful because it organized the classes by the department and gave descriptions for each, but we had to keep in mind that it was 10 years old.

So, we had a big task ahead of us. UACh doesn’t have an ag journalism program, so we’re planning on filling some of our basic agriculture and international studies requirements. Once we found a class or group of classes that seemed promising, we had to compare it to some of the ones on our list of requirements and see if it might be similar. We threw together a big list of possible classes and then it was time for phase two.

Phase two was finding a person that could tell us about the class and its schedule. We used the old course book to find out which department the course was in and the professor who taught the class (10 years ago…). Then Marcelo took us to each different building to talk with the secretary or the professor who teaches the class. It was only the week before classes started, but a lot of the professors still didn’t have regular office hours yet. The first day we went around, we only talked with one person. All the others told us to return at a different time.

So, phase two took about three days. Another challenge that we discovered as we were talking with the professors is that it’s difficult to find out how many credits each class is worth. Since we’re trying to fulfill some of our UW-Madison requirements, it’s definitely important that we know how many credits we’re going to earn. We also have to make sure that we have at least 12 credits to be considered full-time students.

Finally, we had our list basically completed. I still didn’t know the days and times of three of my classes because they hadn’t been set yet, so I was just crossing my fingers. We took the lists to the office for exchange students so they can enroll us in the classes through the online system. We won’t find out if everything works out until Monday. It’ll be a long weekend of crossing my