een semester in utrecht

Today I had my frist lectures. The university system here is a little bit different from that in Germany. Here we do not have 2 semesters in an acadamic year, we have now 4 periods instead, each raound about 10 weeks. If you count them together you will soon realize that this is a bit more than a german acadamic year, so where to get the missing time? Of course from the holidays.

But lets come back to my lectures in the frist period. It did not worked out the way I wanted. My faculty actually scrambled my schedule a bit and as a result I now have to take three courses (not more than two are usually recommended). Two of them I got to know today.

The first one is called ‘Intelligent Agents’. It is an introduction course for agent technology: a little bit of philosophical motivation, a lot of logical formalism and technical stuff. Just the way I like my AI courses ;).

The overview session today was also quite nice. Our lecturer told us something about what we are up to in the next weeks, but also found the time to show us many nice pictures and videos from up-to-date research.

The second lecture was ‘Advanced Data Mining”. As far as I understood it, it is all about building models from incomplete data, or such that was collected to answer other questions. The tool of choice in this case is of course inductive reasoning, which makes this lecture a nice counterpart to my other course.

Unfortunately I could not attend the whole lecture, I had to leave after the coffeebreak. Yeah you read correctly coffebreak, that it is very common in the Netherlands. If you believe it or not. It is not only limited to universities, even in dutch cinemas you can find it. The Dutch students also do not know an acadamic quarter so the lectures start right on time, but after 45min there is always a quarter of an hour coffeebreak, followed by another 45min of lecture.

Another very nice aspect is that the frist lecture of the day does not start earlier than 9am. It is quite perfect for those who want to sleep out late, at least if you do not have to cycle five six kilometers to get to the university (or even ten to get to the city).

However I run off the topic. The second part of the ADM lecture I had to attend the general introduction of the university. It was especcially designed for exchange students, but as I already had the mastersintroduction, there were only a few things I did not know before.

The Introduction ended in the late afternoon and because there was not so much time left to get to the city, go shopping, return to my place and cook something,  I decided to try out the dinner in one of the students restaurants (Mensa ) of the university. Since there was still some time left I decided to check out the library at De Uithof. It was quite a good decision. I have not managed to find all interesting sections of the library, but I found some nice places to work. There is really a lot of space to do your studies. Freely avaible computers and if you want to bring your own one even desks where you can plugin your laptop (network connection included). They even made provision for the noise sensitives. There are a few glass cabins, each containing one of the desks mentioned before. You can just lock yourself in there and work in absolut silence.

For dinner I had chinese noodles with a cocos-curry sauce. It was quite tasty, although 5€ seemed a little bit expensive compared to the UOS mensa standard I am used to.

Tomorrow there will be another introduction. This time it is the turn of the faculty of humanities.