NOTE: I had to publish this post today because I didn’t have time to finish writing it yesterday.

Welcome to day 2 of semester 5. Today I had two classes, “but wait!” I hear you cry, “didn’t you say you had three classes?” Yes, I did, but considering the Political Science class I chose was done so when PoliSci was originally my major, I decided to drop it since I actually don’t need it for a minor. Plus it gives me more time to study and focus on my history courses as they will all be research, reading, and writing heavy, I need all the time I can realistically give myself. So now I only have to worry about three classes: Historiography, Early Europe, and Modern Europe. I know my studies seem very focused on Europe, and honestly they are, and that is because I am interested in the USSR and Portugal (where my family is from). Do I expect to get the best education on the Soviet Union at this Canadian university? Hell no, but it’s worth a shot, and if I have to debunk anything in my papers then so be it, as long as my sources are good I should be fine; also, a class in pre-modern history and one in modern history are required for the degree so why not take the ones related to each other? Next semester I have a class focused on East Asia so I will be leaving the Eurosphere soon, don’t worry. I am interested in all socialist counturies, in every continent, but available classes do not venture very far so I’ll take what I can get, if that makes sense. you’ll be happy to know that whenever I can I do mention socialist states outside of Europe in my papers as much as I can when relevant.

With all that out of the way let’s move on to how day 2 went. As you can imagine, it was all just introductions and syllabus stuff. I start my day with Early Europe and this class will focus Europe from 1450 to 1789, as my professor (and I am assuming the school as well) consider the French Revolution as the start of the modern age in Europe. We will begin with the Renaissance and continue from there, with the bulk of our study being in the 16th and 17th century. So we will be learning about the foundational period of time for modern Europe to emerge. We then moved on to the dreaded icebreakers… the professor introduced herself first with a few fun facts, I wont go into most of them but one thing is she specializes in 17th century France and Louis the 14th. I was the last person to go and when she got to me I just said “my name is Adrik, and thats it.” Thankfully that was enough as I was honestly expecting her to push for more as everyone else essentially gave their life stories. (Fun fact! My name is not Adrik, I literally just used a random name generator for an alias since I was having a hard time picking one)

I was honestly surprised that we didn’t get into the course content as class time is an hour and a half, but we ended early since it was our first day (for this course). So after Early Europe I headed to the bookstore to pick up a required workbook (can’t believe I had to spend money on this…) and headed to the library. Since I am not taking that PoliSci class this term I have THREE HOURS between classes which means I can eat lunch, study, and write the first half of these posts. So I have time to do whatever I need to. Before we get into my next class I’m just going to complain for a second: students have a special website where all our courses are listed with the content we need, this includes the syllabus, lecture slides, readings, etc. basically anything the professor chooses to give us for the class. So while one professor may provide slides, another might not. But what is always given is the syllabus, but for some reason every time I looked at my Modern Europe course the syllabus is not there! Which was very frustrating as I like to have an idea of what reading materials we will need so I can download them (I have purchased very few books unless I think they will be worth it for the long term, like Plato and Aristotle). Girl, give me my syllabus! Anyway…

I got the syllabus half an hour before class. Anyway, this professor also specializes in France, more specifically the enlightenment and revolution. So because of this I’m a little worried that France will be at the forefront of both my Europe classes… It’s not that I don’t want to learn about France, its just that other countries exist and have done important things. But it’s only been one day so there’s still time, I also need to recheck the syllabus schedule. Anyway there are three books required for this class, none of them are textbooks, she actually gave us a textbook if we want to use it but it isn’t required, I will personally use it (there’s one online through our library, so no money spent) just for further information in case I accidentally miss anything during a lecture. The three books we need are The Communist Manifesto, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Survival in Auschwitz. We have to choose one of these books to write our essay on, obviously I will be choosing the manifesto. On the syllabus one of our lecture weeks will be about the Russian revolution “Leninist Communism to Stalinist Totalitarianism.” So that’s something. This first class had no icebreakers, probably because there were too many students, and after the syllabus we just moved into lectures. We just learned about the enlightenment period in France so we have context for the revolution. Nothing of note was said so I’ll just end the post here.