School life at Fudan (1): Dormitory, and Courses I am taking

It is kind of late to start blogging in March when the semester ends in July. So I have decided to update more frequently before the cramming period starts. Well at least I should get all the introduction-to-my-school-life-at-Fudan entries done asap. So let’s get started.

On August 26, 2008, I arrived at the Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and kicked off my year-long adventure in China. At the beginning I really had a hard time dealing with everything on my own. Fortunately I survived all the challenges, and settled down quickly. Since then, life at Fudan has been fun.

I live in a single room at the Foreign Students Dormitory, which is (along with the residences of the master and doctoral students) located at the north-west corner of the campus. Every single room is equipped with a private bathroom, an air conditioner and a television set. (But both TV broadcasts and internet access are not free.) My room gets dusty all the time, since the window faces the road (or an intersection, to be precise), despite the fact that I live on the 16th floor.

Since 90% of my classrooms are located at the south of the campus, every day it takes me around 25 minutes to walk to class. I do not dare to ride a bike (not even inside the campus), even though everyone else does. This is because for someone who has not biked for at least eight years, biking should be the last thing he or she would do in China. I will talk about this later in a blog entry related to transportation in Shanghai.

Fudan follows the two-semester system, just like U of T. However, the credit system at Fudan is much more complicated than the U of T one. The number of credits required to graduate varies from major to major. Also, foreign students at Fudan are allowed to take fewer credits due to language and cultural barriers. Basically they are exempted from taking classes such as Marxist ideologies and Chinese political thoughts (i.e. Mao, Deng…) … which are compulsory for all local undergraduate students.

For visiting students like me, there are no compulsory courses. We can take whatever we want as long as the course is sponsored by the School of International Relations and Public Affairs (the department to which I belong). And I am very satisfied with this flexibility in course selection.

Anyway, after calculating the credit weights and everything, I figured out that I am required to take around 8 courses PER semester in order to get 5.0 credits at U of T. Sounds crazy eh? Luckily the readings for each class are not as heavy as the ones for U of T classes. The language barrier remains a problem till now though.

Since my major at Fudan is International Politics, I have been taking such classes as diplomacy, international political economy, Russian/U.S. /E.U. politics and foreign relations… but of course, since my major at U of T is Asia-Pacific Studies, I am also taking a few Asian-related courses, e.g. the CCP studies, contemporary/modern Chinese foreign relations, the Chinese metropolis…

These classes give me a broader scope of the world, and I will write more about these classes, the professors and students later.