By jfbarszcz
Once again, I'm writing this week's post in a bit of a rush, since in just a few short hours I'll be boarding a plane to Amsterdam for the weekend! (Yeah yeah I know, I'm doing such stereotypical American college kid things in Europe: Oktoberfest, Amsterdam.... Definitely looking forward to spending the next couple weekends after this one at "home" in Prague though!) So I apologize in advance for any weird incoherence caused by my not thoroughly revising/editing my post.
My prompt this week is "Discuss what the academic culture is like in your host country." While I can't really say for sure what academic culture is like as a whole in the Czech Republic, I can talk a little about what I DO know about it, as well as how my academic experience thus far has been similar to and different from my experiences at GW. With that disclaimer out of the way let's get started.
In terms of higher education as a whole, there are a few very noticeable differences between the American and Czech systems. For one, private universities are far less popular than they are in the United States. This is perhaps with good reason. In the Czech Republic all citizens are guaranteed free education at all levels (even postgraduate!). Who'd want to pay GW tuition when you have a system like that? Therefore, it goes without saying that Charles, as the country's flagship national university, is very, very big. In all there are about 50,000 students attending Charles. Being located in a large city, Charles lacks the real campus that many American universities have. Rather, the buildings are spread out across the city. As an example, I think I've mentioned that my dormitory is about 20 minutes by public transport from the Faculty of Arts building where I have most of my classes. GW may not be known for a "green campus," but compared to Charles it looks like a liberal-arts college. Size aside, Charles is also an excellent school, considered to be one of the most prestigious universities in Europe (and the third-oldest!) and apparently in the top 1.5% worldwide.
The classes themselves are definitely a bit different from what I'm used to at GW as well. Most notably, all my classes meet either twice a week for 90 minutes a session, or once a week for three whole hours. The good news though is that my program also has no Friday classes. The upshot of this is that my Mondays suck (six hours of class!) but once I finish that first day then the rest of my week is cake. I suppose this is done to maximize the amount of free time we have to explore, both the city during the week and sometimes other locales on the weekend. So I guess it's actually a pretty nice arrangement.
Speaking of which, I've just returned from Amsterdam and I have to report that it was incredible! (Yeah, I didn't finish the blog post before leaving...) Walking through the city made me feel like I was in a storybook. In my opinion it was way more fun than Oktoberfest last weekend; I enjoyed actually getting to go and look around the city (which is extremely walkable) and I rather appreciated Amsterdam's more laid-back vibe and wide variety of things to do as opposed to Oktoberfest's practically singular goal of getting drunk (pretty sure I had at least two opportunities in that sentence to make a coffeeshop joke...). Anyway, this is getting off-topic here and I am very, VERY tired and have far too much class tomorrow (remember what I said about Mondays?). Therefore I must apologize for my curtness but I'm going to bed now. Bye.