Everyday life at the university

¡Hola muchachos!

Now I'll try to explain a little about how the school is here. I go to Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires, more often known as ITBA, which is a fairly small private university. The public universities are free in Argentina, and apparently quite good too, but ITBA has tuition fees for the degree students. As an exchange student, however, I don't have to pay (except for the Spanish courses).

ITBA is located in Puerto Madero, very near the center of the city. It is sort of like the business district, there are a lot of skyscrapers and people in suits around. The word puerto means port or harbour, and Puerto Madero was supposed to be the port of the city but quickly became useless for that since the canal is too small for the large ships. The ferries to Uruguay have their terminals near ITBA though. There are a lot of nice restaurants and cafés by the canal, and there is a big ecological reserve (basically a huge park) close by too.

Puente de la mujer (the woman's bridge) in Puerto Madero.

One of the many subte (subway) stations I see every day. It takes me about 40 min to get to ITBA by subte.

The building is quite old, and the front looks nice from the outside, but most of if is quite worn down on the inside. There are actually two buildings, the main building and the "anexo", plus the post-grad building 2 blocks away. The main building is a bit nicer, it has the main cafeteria and a nice fancy lobby. The anexo is where I have most of my classes, and it is a bit of a maze. Both buildings have 5 floors (I think). Some days it is a bit cold in some of the classrooms, since it is winter here now, but most of the time it's actually not bad. Hopefully the AC will work in the summer...

The façade of the main building. (Picture not taken by me, all of this is under construction right now so not visible.)

The other side of the building. The difference between the façade on the right and the side on the left is quite notable.

University life at ITBA is good: the teachers are in general better at teaching than at Aalto, there is a lot of discussion going on in the classroom and the subjects have been interesting so far. But it does feel kind of like being back in high school: attendance is compulsory and in general you have a lot less freedom than we're used to in Finland. You still have responsibilities though, (unlike in high school) you really have to make an effort to find out what you need to do, because the information might be hidden quite well in the maze of websites the school uses (very much like Aalto back home, yes) or sometimes not available anywhere at all. We have the same courses during the whole semester, which lasts from the beginning of August until the end of November, plus final exams in December. I think it will be a nice change to be able to get deeper into a subject than we do back home, where most of the courses last 7 weeks (the year is divided into 5 periods).

I have 5 courses at the moment:

- Marketing

- Databases 1

- Entrepreneurship

- Information Systems

- Spanish B2

All of them are in Spanish, but it's actually going pretty well. I'm able to understand most of the lectures, but class discussions are a struggle since I'm not able to form my opinions into sentences quickly enough, and I can't always understand the Argentine students when they speak quickly. But I'll get there soon I guess!

My class schedule is the following:

Monday 13-21

Tuesday 14-17

Wednesday 13-17

Thursday 9-12 (optional practice session)

Friday: nada! :)

I'm quite happy with my schedule since it allows 4-day trips during the weekends. I also only have one late evening (some people have classes until 22h some days) and one early morning. Everything happens much later during the day here, so class at 9h is really a struggle. If you go out to dinner, the normal time is 21 or 21.30 (we Europeans tend to go a bit earlier though), and if you want a drink afterwards it's easily 2 a.m. before you get to go to sleep. Clubs start getting full at 2-3 a.m. (not that I would know, haven't really been to clubs).

Last weekend we traveled to el Palmar, an area with a forest of palm trees, but more about that in another post!

Sneak peek from El Palmar.

¡Chau!