University of Konstanz: the good and the bad

Overall, Konstanz is quite a nice university. It has about 10,000 students, which is about half of NAUs student population. I think this a good size of school, because it is not overwhelmingly large, but big enough to meet a lot of different people. The university has its good and bad points, just like anything else, and I want to explores those here.

First, I will talk about the bad to get that out of the way. The first thing that is not so great is the fact the campus is a maze. I got lost in its confusing mess of hallways and stairs many times when I first got here. It doesn't take too long to figure out that you have to just follow the signs indicating the direction of the alphabetized buildings. I still often do not know exactly where I am going, I just follow the signs until I somehow end up in the right place. The second thing, is the way that one signs up for classes, which I talked about in detail a few weeks ago. I’m not going to repeat myself here, but still not fan of that system. The third thing is the computer systems that the university uses to run its academics. They are frankly terrible, and not user friendly at all. But that will not be unfamiliar to us at NAU, looking at you LOUIE and BBLearn. But these are somehow worse than those programs.

Now onto the good. Once again, the campus is the first on the list. How is it on both? Because the university HAS a campus, unlike many other German schools that I have heard of. We visited the university of Freiburg on an excursion a while back, and it is scattered throughout the city. It is so much better to have it all in one place. Secondly, the library here is one of the best I have ever seen. It puts Cline at NAU to shame in the sheer number of books, even though it is physically smaller in size. It also has book in several languages, which is very useful. Cline has an extremely limited selection of humanities books, many of which are out of date, since the university has decided the only thing that matters is STEM subjects. Konstanz ,however, has a great selection of humanities works. It even has an entire section of classical works, in German, English and their original languages.The international office of the university is also great, especially the man in charge of GO Konstanz, who's is named Frank. He will help you out with anything you need. Frank is also just a great guy, who is quick with humor and is very easy going. Any problems I have had, the international office is more than willing and capable to help me take car of it.

Now I will discuss some things that could be seem as either good or bad. Firstly, the way academics are conducted here is very different than what I am used to. You have a lot more freedom in your studies. This is great if you like to do your own thing and find the structure of American academics restrictive. But if you are not good at making sure that you are staying on top of your studies, there is going to be a rude awakening at the end of the semester. My German course has very little homework compared to the classes I took at NAU, but we have two test that are our entire grade. So if I do not regularly study of my own volition, I would probably fail these tests. Secondly, your grades are determined by very few assignments. In most of my courses there are only one or two assignments, and one or two test to determine your entire grade. This is different than in the US, where there is at least two test and probably several paper and/or projects throughout the semester. I prefer to have the grade more distributed, so that each assignment is not the end all be all for the class. Some people like this system though, because then you do not spend so much time writing papers and whatnot.

Konstanz being dramatic

This is a picture of the list of GERman courses that we were divided up into after GO Konstanz.