Classes and such

Since classes started, I've been fairly busy. I joined the Psychology Society since they put on a lot of events and they give you access to a special book sale. I also joined the student newspaper and have been attending a couple meetings for that. I'm working on the music section here. It mostly seems to be that if you want to review a CD, or cover a gig, you can and if your review is good enough, it will get printed in the paper. I'm hoping to cover a gig [Hot Chip] later this month but it all depends on if they get the tickets or not. I haven't heard anything yet though. There's another meeting this week though so we'll see if they have any more gigs for me.

I also joined the peer mentoring scheme for psychology students to get some extra support. As a study abroad student, they don't have as many services to ease us in as I feel they do for freshers. Or, the international centre was a bit slow in sending out notices as I failed to hear about my psychology introduction meeting. So I joined the mentoring scheme which is basically a mentor, or two, to help ease freshman students into college life. There's a few other international students involved too. However, I think I'm actually older than my mentors so I'm not sure how involved I'll become with the peer mentoring scheme. I think I'm actually doing a class that's at a higher level than my mentors...

I've also been busy looking for a job, preferably on campus. I've applied a few places but haven't heard much of anything. I'm going to keep trying though as I know it's the beginning of the school year and so many other students are looking for jobs as well.

I also wanted to get involved in some research while I'm here- versus being a subject- although I'd still like to do that if possible. So, I emailed a bunch of professors and grad students and had a couple meetings with professors last week. They went well and I've decided to work with a professor studying language. She's relatively new to the university as well. She had lived in Canada [either Montreal or Quebec...can't remember which one] for the last ten years. She's studying language and how the brain processes language- especially words that have more than one meaning. I'll be doing more elementary tasks, especially in the beginning, but maybe eventually I'll be able to carry out an experiment. The amount of time that I'm here limits me, so I can't necessarily learn how to carry out an fMRI but I've asked to sit in on some sessions. This way, I can sort of get a feeling for the work that goes into fMRIs. I haven't started working for her yet but that might start up in the next week or two.

I'm pretty excited about everything going on here though. Everything's been really good and everyone's been really nice. I was worried that English people might have engrained the worst stereotypes of Americans [loud, obnoxious, etc] and would think everyone was like that. But I've actually run across a lot of people that are seemingly obsessed with America. They love the TV programs, they love the ideals, they want to move there. I suppose me being from California doesn't hurt either as everyone has taken really well to that. Everytime I go somewhere that requires me to show my ID, I get a lot of comments/questions. Everyone is curious about California. My "accent" used to get a lot of comments and questions too but I think people are getting used to it now as I haven't had as many comments as I did when I first moved in. Funny enough though, I've heard from a lot of people that love the American accent.

Also, as a sidenote, if you're keeping up with my flickr- since I have a free account, I can only display 200 pictures. So, it will show the 200 most recent ones but will hide the others. I just hit the maximum the other day. They're all saved on my computer though and they're on my facebook if you're facebook friends with me. Just a side note in case you were going through all of them and wondered what had happened to them.

xx