Classes

Classes

Actual classes have begun this week and I would still be feeling like I am on holiday (which I kinda am…) if not for the fact that classes are outrageously long!! I’ve never had classes that went straight for 3 hours. I’m taking a Business Strategy class which goes from 2.30 to 5.45pm every Monday. It’s crazy…you tend to find yourself losing concentration after the first hour. The thing is, the lecturer’s are Italian and speak with a strong Italian accent so you’ve actually gotta concentrate hard to figure out what they are saying. Plus their handwriting is completely illegible… I supposed the lecturer for Business Strategy isn’t so bad coz he doesn’t have too strong an Italian accent, plus it’s a pretty interesting class and he’s not boring. He keeps telling us that the real title for the class is “How to Make Money…Legally”.

I’ve gotta say that the worst lecturer I have is the one for International Marketing. His Italian accent is so strong that half the time I wonder if I’m sitting in an Italian class instead. His handwriting is illegible and he mumbles from time to time to make himself even more incomprehensible. Perhaps he’s aiming to bore everyone into dropping the class, especially since there are so many of us taking that class and the lecture theatre assigned is too small to hold everyone.

Speaking of small lecture theatres, the one assigned to us for Management of Fashion Companies is ridiculously tiny considering that they knew how popular the class would be!! Plus the theatre isn’t even the bench type like the others, thereby disallowing fitting of more people on the seats. Rather, it has individual seats which are extremely uncomfortable for sitting in one place for half an hour never mind the fact that the lecture is 3 hours long…

Contrary to my expectations, my class in Technology and Innovation Management has been the best so far. I thought it would be really boring coz it wasn’t a paper I’d have taken by choice, but I didn’t have a choice and it’s the last paper I can get credit for back in Otago so I had to take it even though it totally clashes with my International Marketing class on Wednesdays (I’ll have to attend classes alternate weeks…). Anyway, the lecturer is hilarious and he’s really young…or at least he looks it…he looks like he’s under 25, but he’s a professor. He’s really loud and his English isn’t too bad. He has a funny way of speaking though…rather than dropping his voice inflection at the end of a sentence as people normally do, he maintains it so it sounds really weird as if the sentence is uncompleted but not quite.

As I’ve mentioned he’s hilarious. In today’s lecture, he constantly went on and on about how big companies can’t grow and survive and he kept telling us, “What I’m saying here, ragazzi, is that to survive you must grow! And you must grow in double digits otherwise you’ll die and you won’t have enough pension to pay for a room in a 5 star hotel.” He also loves asking “Giusto?” after making a point and then he’ll answer himself half a second later, exclaiming, “Giustissimo!” At one point in the lecturer, he leaned into one of the guys sitting in front and said, “In 15 years, ragazzi, you should be at the peak of your career otherwise you’ll never survive. Giusto? Giustissimo!” (exclaiming the ‘giustissimo’ of course). The look on the poor guy’s face was priceless…he was pretty much staring at the lecturer as if the lecturer had just sprouted 2 heads. I’m definitely looking forward to the lecture tomorrow.

Note: For the curious, “giusto” means ‘right’ and “giustissimo” implies that something is “more right than right” i.e. extremely right…whoever said Italians were sane?