Study news from Jan

Study news from Jan – in his own words!

URI

Stands for University of Rhodes Island, the place where I will be studying this year. I am getting settled in and courses are slowly starting.

I started courses two weeks ago and in the field of geotechnology . And I chose the following courses for this term:

– Seabed Geotechnics

– Designing with Geosynthetics

– Graduate Seminar

– Master’s Thesis Research

– Special Problems

Special Problems is the equivalent to the German “Studienarbeit”. In order to get through my studies I have to do two of these. I already wrote the first paper back in France and now I hope to get the second one done this winter term.

As you can see I am already working on my master´s thesis. I decided to stick with Prof. Baxter and work on the subject: “Settlement of Adjacent Ground from Pile Driving in Silts”.

I have to say that classes are a lot different over here. First the Professors make you buy books from Professors where they graduated. Then you get to do case studies every two weeks, which means that you have to hand in a summary of a problem you have read about and summarized. The idea is that you should start reading about the topic yourself and get your thoughts a little bit together. And last but not least you have mid terms.

This is completely different to the system in Germany, where there are almost no assignments and you only have to write an exam at the end of each term. I think here they rather want to make you work all through the year.

I did a tour this week over the campus and gathered some pictures to give you a little impression.

Thanks Jan, nice to know something about your studies – as well as your new ‘Panzer! I shall add two pics from him. First his college (looks nice) and one of him posing at playing golf! I thought Daniel was the poser par excellence, but you are catching up!