English Language Challenges

English started at beginning of year, with the test. I failed some questions and I knew I had to take English in University.

Since there I waited, I had to take English 4, so the first semester I was relaxed in that way, but starting the second semester I knew the end will begin.

I imagined that the experience of taking the course will be the same that in the secondary school, a teacher just doing a class, with a lot of guides helping him/her, teaching some terms, grammatical times and a better grammar in general; and sometimes it was like that, but not ever, there is a difference between the two kind of English-teaching, and was the blogs, or the simple fact of a laboratory of English, were you had to write A LOT!

Blogs were not bad, and sometimes I have to admit that I entertained, but in general, I think that there is to improve the category of blogs, with maybe a free-election blog or something like that. All the other things I see that are well thought, but I have to recognize that a lot of times I was exhausted in the classes, and I fell asleep, and maybe a more interactive class will mend this for good.

But all this, all the semester, a little bit of the content of classes and exercise with pronunciation helped me a lot.

The other day someone called me home, and his voice sounded like an English-speaker. Summarizing he was wrong with the number but was nice to know that I can communicate with another person that knows the language.

But I think that the best help of learning English is the search results. The best results or at least the majority of them are in English, and not dominate that language means that you have to minimize your search at Spanish search results, that in many cases can be a little bit.

Changes to my Study Programme

When someone tries to postulate to a university, usually the curriculum of the career is one of the first things to see.  A comparative analysis is the best way to decide which career you want to study and in which university.

Nevertheless, there are always bad things with the good things that you choose of the career/university. And in terms of that, I can tell a little about some changes that I think that are fundamental for the best education and a study programme (at least of the Chemistry career).

The curriculum, with the new changes that were implanted, has improved so much. Maybe there are some mistakes in the order of the subjects, with General Chemistry Lab and General Chemistry II in the same semester, or Inorganic Chemistry Lab with Inorganic Chemistry II, that is a counter-productive measure, keeping in mind that in Laboratories the theoretical learning is evaluated in practice.

All this was done to improve the length of the career, but I think that this has to be more, for 2 simple reasons: 1) the workload is too big in the advanced years (4^th and 5^th) which raise the failure probabilities and becomes a delay in the subjects and more years studying, and 2) Maybe there’s a lack of social-abilities or introduction subjects, that, with more years (and maybe just another semester), can be simply solved.

In terms of infrastructure and buildings of the faculty, there is a disaster. At lunchtime, there is not enough space to do it, and some of the students have to lunch in the floor or stand up, and this problem is bigger in autumn/winter when the rains don’t let to sit on the floor or the grass. There are not enough classrooms and sometimes 200 or 250 students have to be enclosed in a classroom where there is not enough space.

So, that’s the big problem of the faculty and that’s need to be solved now!!

And well, talking about teaching methods, I think that it is not bad, but can improve a little more. Maybe the teachers don't have to do their classes all with digital presentations, maybe a little of board marker is good for a better-understanding class, but obviously never leaving out the digital possibilities and the use of technology, that has been growing up in the last time and can be used for the good in the classes, showing examples or making the life easy for the teachers of more complicated subjects, or that need more specific draws or explanations (life, for my career, can be Inorganic Chemistry II or Electrochemistry).