The new semester has begun!

Meh, classes started again on Monday. At 9 am with Research Methods (for our dissertations/major projects). It was very exciting to see everyone back together again though. I was ridiculously perky. It's that "first day of school" thing, I guess. I wouldn't know because this is the first time I'm experiencing this which, in my opinion, speaks volumes about how much I've been enjoying myself here.

We have 5 student from Paris X university over as ERASMUS exchanges. I started chatting with them. It feels so good to have someone to speak French to! They're quite nice too. Someone had the good idea to invite them to Jazz night yesterday, which I had completely forgot to tell them about. So we had a chat over the music. The Bullingdon (a.k.a. The Bully) has live jazz every tuesday in the backroom. The Bullingdon is right in front of Tesco on Cowley Road. It's something of a regular thing for a lot of the people on the course. It's very good. I meant to go more often but I'm a lazy bum who doesn't want to go walk down the hill to it (and then back up again).

We also had New Product Development on Monday. It's a class that brings together everything we learned last semester. It's a role-play class! We're "Buckley Publishing" and are divided into groups that are different division within the company. I'm in the Education division (meh). We each have to come up with a new product that will fit with our goals (slightly different per division according to our "profile"). It looks like it's going to be labor intensive and the groups are huge! 9 people! It was bad enough with 4-6 last semester! We're all going to end up hating each other!

We also handed in our dissertation registration forms. They're going to assign us to Research methods seminar groups that are relevant to our subjects. In the end, I've decided to go with Open Access and Free audiobooks. I wanted to work on an ecological topic but I couldn't come up with one especially interesting angle to work on (that's what happens when you have too much interest in something I guess) and I was going to touch on digital media anyway so now I'll do it the other way around. Incorporate some ecology into a digital dissertation. I'm quite excited about the subject now and looking forward to starting to work on it.

I have Digital Media class this afternoon where, get this, one of the assignments is to have a blog and update it regularly. I've got the blog part down, I'll need to work on the updating regularly thing though, heh. We'll also be graded on how we customize our blog which I don't know how to do yet but we'll be taught and on the research that goes into the posts. Yes, I can't use this blog for the class (*le sigh*) but at least I have some blogging experience and I'll be able to make this blog better too. I love it when things work out that way. We'll also be covering Photoshop and Dreamweaver, two programs I've used before and some other two things I can't remember and have never used.

Should be fun, all in all.