Summing Up My First Week Of Classes

Trivia I learned about Sheffield:

1. Sheffield had inhabitants dating back to the upper-Paleolithic era. You can find old cave paintings near here!
2. After the Norman Conquest, Sheffield Castle was built to protect the surrounding area. Mary, Queen of Scots was imprissoned at Sheffield Castle and Sheffield Manor from 1570-1584.
3. In 1864, there was The Great Sheffield Flood, which was caused by a damn collapsing upstream. It caused all of the bridges to be wiped out, along with 400 buildings and 270 people died.
4. Sheffield is derived from two Old English words. Sheff is a derivative of the word "Shief" or "parting " or "clearing". "Feld", on the other hand, means "trees" or "woods." So, originally Sheffield was a clearing in the woods near the rivers Don and Sheaf.
5. There's an estimated 2.5 million trees in the City of Sheffield, giving it the highest ratio of trees to people of any European city!

I'm just going to summarize the highlights of the past few days.

WEDNESDAY:

I worked on a group project to be presented today (Friday) during the afternoon. Good news! I found out today, Friday, that Wednesdays are mostly going to be free work periods. It's sort of a free day! :D

The evening was the fun bit! I joined my friend Bri at an improv comedy group gathering! There was lots of laughter and games for two hours! It was a fantastic way of breaking up the week.

THURSDAY:

My day really started at 2 pm, at class. A Civil Engineer came to talk to the Land Contamination and Re-vitalizaiton class on mining techniques and ways of mitigating it. He went into great depths about the various methods, and focused on how to minimize land settling and sinking. Those are all important, but there wasn't as much covered in the way of how to mitigate pollution on site caused by the mining process. Next week in class we are going on a field trip to our site that we'll be addressing in our final projects.

After that, my classmates and I rallied what was left of our attention span and sat in on a guest lecture given by one of the professors in the department about his design process creating a piece for the Chelsea Flower Show and other projects around the UK based off his initial design from last year. It was quite fascinating to listen to!

FRIDAY:

In class today we presented our research of our project site that we'll be eventually proposing designs for. It was useful doing it as group presentations, so we all didn't have to research everything individually. I took away some good initial concepts about things I need to research more and where I might like to take this.

This evening, I'm going to join several of my classmates I've met in my design studio at their house and chill! I'm really looking forward to that!

I bought a ticket through the university to do a day trip to Oxford next weekend!

Initial Impressions and Observations of Sheffield, England:

I think you will all agree that I have had a very busy culture-adjusting week!

• Since there isn't much homework assigned, you see people going out frequently in the middle of the week. At home, you only go out Thursday, Friday, Saturday. (Thursday is only for the hardy few.)
• There also don't seem to be evening classes. Interesting!
• Again, lectures are different in that the professors are called tutors and the paper sizes are different.
• You'd think that after all the visits I've made to England, I'd be used to the accents, but there are some where I have NO IDEA what they are saying!
• mester = small merchant shop
• pally = adjective. overly-friendly? That's what the guy next to me said it meant.
• I'm missing my veggies, I'm afraid.
• I'm also missing the street trees.
• It's very true about the rain in England! Almost everyday it's been overcast or raining. It's not a problem. I have a lot of rain-gear with me. No wonder everything looks so green and alive here!
• There are so many Magpies!