Classes in Argentina

A lot of people have been asking me how classes have been going here in Argentina. As I’m doing a study abroad program this seems like a reasonable request, but I’ve neglected to write about classes here until now. There are several reasons for this but to understand that you first have to understand the structure of the way I’m taking classes here in Argentina.

There are two main ways that you can go about doing a study abroad program 1) direct enrollment, wherein you apply to and become an official student in a foreign university or 2) you take classes through a program, wherein the program has a relationship with a university(s) in the foreign country and handles the transfer of credits to your home university. In my case I actually receive a transcript from the university that runs the program, Butler University, even though I took all of the classes thousands of miles away.

The Argentine Universities Program is one of the programs run by the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA) of Butler University and it’s the program that runs study abroad in Buenos Aires. As part of the program, we can take classes at any combination of four different universities in the city; the public university Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Universidad Torcuato di Tella, a recently private university, and two catholic (also private) universities, Universidad Catolica Argentina (UCA) and Universidad de Salvador (USAL). The advantage of this is arrangement is that it allows us not only to access different course offerings at different schools, but also to experience what it’s like taking classes at Universities that are very different from one another (something I may get into in greater detail in a later post). We also have a two to four week drop/add period (depending on the start dates of the different schools) where we can try out as many as three classes at any given university. This gives us the ability to weed out classes which don’t really interest us, turn out to be harder than we anticipated, or just don’t fit our schedule anymore.

The disadvantage to this arrangement is that it can be very stressful, especially at first. When you’re first getting to know the city and how to get to various places, trying to take busses across town to get to classes at three (I didn’t take classes at USAL) different universities, when some of those classes overlap (which you may or may not have anticipated) can be a headache. Also, especially for me, the notion of going to a class which you are in all likelihood not going to be attending—because if you try out three times as many classes as you’re going to take that means you’re dropping two thirds of them—is a stressful one. I like to go into a class and prepare myself for what I’m going to have to do for the semester, anticipate what’s ahead and start to plan my life, schedule etc. That’s harder to do when you don’t even know which classes you’re going to take exactly. And some of these decisions end up getting made on the fly—I decided to drop one of my classes, the history of economic thinking, partly based on the anecdotal reports of one of my peers and partly because it overlapped with a few of the last orientation events (including signing up for classes at the UCA) so that I ended up not going just because I’d missed a few classes already.

Now things are finally getting settled and I pretty much know what my schedule is going to be (although several of my professors just changed classrooms/start and end times for classes). I put off signing up for volunteer work, which I intend to do, because I didn’t know what my schedule was going to be yet, so hopefully I can get started on that soon. But it was this phenomenon coupled with our very long orientation period that is the culprit for my not having written anything about classes so far. Hopefully I’ll get around to actually writing about the classes I’ve decided to stick with in the near future.