Day 26: The Semester Begins

This morning, the semester officially started at the university (Technische Universität Dresden). They organized a meeting for all Erasmus students in a main lecture hall in the Science building. When I arrived, the hall was full. The meeting consisted of a talk by a group of professors (I assume they were professors) who gave us a presentation about the university, its statistics (70% of foreign students are Chinese, 23% are Vietnamese, and the remaining 7% are from other countries) and its history. Afterwards, they organized us into groups according to our major, giving us colored papers: dark blue for electrical engineering, green for mechanical engineering, red for medicine, light blue for sciences...

Then you had to find where the people with the same color as you were. In the chaos of people looking for their group, I met another Spaniard who is going to study chemistry; his name is José Antonio, and he is from Córdoba. We exchanged email addresses to arrange to sign up for as many subjects as we can together. When we were all with our corresponding color, they divided us again into smaller groups of ten people and assigned us a tutor. The tutor is a student from your faculty who will help you with whatever you need during the course. My tutor is a Chinese student who doesn't speak English and is almost as lost as we are (or more so). He showed us the faculty (its buildings and its laboratories) and the library. The visit lasted two hours. I returned home somewhat angry because the Chinese guide had no idea. Aren't there enough German students in the faculty for a foreign student to have to show the faculty to other foreign students?