How AUSome

Week 1 of classes
29 July - 3 August 2019

                                      Welcome sign to Magnetic Island off the ferry! 

I'm actually living in Australia... for the next few months at least haha! The first week of class is in the books! We started off a bit rocky, pun intended, because my first class was an 8am on monday called Sediment Properties. However, as I sat through the 2 hour lecture I realized I had already learned this material in classes I had taken previously. I couldn’t devote another semester to material I respect but am not the biggest fan of, especially in Australia of all places! SO I had to go on the hunt for another class that fit my schedule and could match with the category of classes I need to fulfill for FGCU. Natural Hazards it was… hopefully…  I am still unsure if the class will count because no one from FGCU has gotten back to me. But I am out of options, so here we are living my best life taking the classes I can haha. Another one of my classes is called Marine Physics. My professor, or as they call them lecturers, is a nice guy who will occasionally wear shoes and ride his bike to class. He’s a cool guy and definitely has the “dad joke” persona. And they all prefer to be called by their first names, no formalities like “mr” “dr” or “prof”, just Scott, Mia and Jon. Really abandoning all etiquettes I have learned during these next few months haha. My last class, Coral Reef Ecology, will truly be the most interesting one as well as the one that will require the most work! Right off the bat on the first day she proudly announces that she loves statistics… so that means a lot of statistics assignments for us. But it’s all for education's sake to hopefully make me a more capable scientist and help me better determine what career pathway I want to pursue! 

It will take some time to get a handle on my courses and the different times they happen each week. Here they break up their classes into different focused learning sessions. For instance, I have 2 lectures for Marine Physics at different times and days, a session for tutorials which is like study help, and a session for practicals which are labs. But thankfully even with how spread out my schedule is I have no class on monday and my friday ends at 1pm! So you know what that means… ADVENTURING! My current goal is to complete my school work during the week so that I have my weekends available to visit new places! Here are two pictures from a beautiful newly built building called The Science Place on campus!
And to celebrate, before life gets too crazy, my first of many adventures was visiting Magnetic Island (aka Maggie) for the first time on saturday! It was overcast for majority of day making it chilly at times, but that didn’t stop us from going around the whole island seeing as many places as we could! And it actually made for great hiking weather, since we ended up walking through the mountains from Horseshoe Bay on one side of the island to Radical Bay on the other. By the end of the day, our legs were surely hurting, but the places we saw made up or it! 
Sunday was laundry day which took a couple of hours to wash everything and the “piece de resistance” is that we do not have a dryer, but a clothesline out back haha. And honestly, to my surprise, everything dried really quickly!! Just have to not acknowledge the fact that there are a lot of bugs and spiders back there. To end my day on a high note I finally made it out to a church!!! The deciding factor though was that they have a bus that comes to campus to pick up everyone. And a big perk for being a first-timer was that I got dinner afterward for free! I deserved it though because it was my luck to randomly be selected for an eating game on stage with those separators holding my mouth open haha! It was all fun though and everyone was a good sport. Worship was super energetic and they actually write their own songs! It was great finally getting to meet other Christians here in Australia, because I didn’t feel like I had anyone like them for the first two weeks. BUT every day I meet someone new, learn a new Aussie phrase, and find a new place on campus or locally! It’s an incredible adventure that i’m so blessed to be apart of!

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