Reflecting on our class

Now without knowing anything about New Zealand apart from that it’s located somewhere at the other end of the world and that they are famous for the kiwi bird, I joined the course out of curiosity (and because it fit into my schedule). I didn’t expect anything except for the typical 90 minute lecture that we usually get in other university classes. Therefore it has been quite refreshing to talk about topics and discuss opinions. That’s not something you get to do very often and it is something I really enjoy because I like to discuss things and get to know other people’s point of view and try to understand it.

There aren’t many downsides to the course except for two. The first one is the time at which the course took place. As we all know 8 o’clock in the morning is basicly still in the middle of the night and therefore students are usually a little comatose and can’t function properly without sufficient caffeine levels. Now I still can’t complain as the course fit perfectly into my schedule but if I didn’t have a 40h workweek on top of 30h of university I would have loved to have the course start at 10 so that I am actually awake and not busy with the “waking up process”.

The second small downside are the blogposts. Now don’t think that I am generally against them as I actually liked this form of “active participation” for the course requirement. The only conflict I have with the blogposts is that they should be opinionated, creative, well written and also about a topic related to New Zealand. I found it increasingly hard to find topics that we didn’t cover during class and I didn’t want to repeat what we did in class as that seemed a little “low effort” and also the topics wouldn’t have been my favorite ones anyways. Therefore I’ve had to come up with some creative and fun topic every second week on top of all the work I had to do. While the latter part is definitely on me, I think that one of the biggest challenges in coming up with a fresh topic was the limited knowledge of New Zealand and therefore the lack of possible topics that I could pick from which would lead to me writing about something I feel deeply connected with.

As you may or may not know I am doing a lot of work for charity and am involved in several social activities on local, national and international levels and absolutely love doing something for others (as you might read in my latest blog post). Therefore I always tried to find a topic that is somehow connected to what I like to do.

Overall I’ve had a great time in this course and enjoyed my time in class and got to know a few awesome people and broadened my still very limited knowledge of New Zealand. All in all it’s been a good course and definitely one of the more enjoyable ones this semester. I would definitely choose it again if I had the choice and I think that I learned quite a bit about New Zealand and the culture which I really enjoyed as understanding other cultures helps a lot when dealing with people from different cultural backgrounds and it is something that will be useful for the rest of my life.

I am looking forward to seeing people in other classes in the future and wish everyone happy holidays and good luck in the exams :)