Things are settling into place. Courses, notebooks, a fragment of routine...

It was a packed first week of classes. Three days of excitement, overwhelm, frustration, and...satisfaction.

My course schedule got less sure as I went from the late-spring course registration missive, to orientation week, to the middle of last week.  The saddest part was when I realized that NRE 560, Behavior and the Environment, was a logistical impossibility: it's on Main Campus, sandwiched in between North Campus courses with 10 minutes transportation time.  That's a 45-minute walk, 20 minutes expected bus, or 11 minutes full tilt (full sweat!) on the bike in good weather.  Not so much.

When I heard UMich had a "shopping period" for courses, I felt right at home.  Everyone shops for classes during the first 1-2 weeks of a Brown semester; it goes right along with the lack of distribution requirements. Two problems here, however. One had to do with "Michigan time," which an orientation packet defined as "the tradition of starting classes 10 minutes late."  Perhaps so, but not universally observed: two classes I tried to shop had started right on time, a few minutes before I got there.  The other had to do with online posting of syllabus and assigned reading: only those who pre-register have access, and many courses had readings due for the first class. Overall, I give UMich's implementation of shopping for courses a B-.

Happily, as of Thursday afternoon, everything had fallen into place. My course schedule for the semester:

• Urban Planning (UP) 540, Planning Theory. "Why do we plan? How do we think it should work? Has it ever worked?"
• UP 513, Legal Aspects of the Planning Process. "What assumptions underlie land ownership and policy? What are the levers we can push?"
• UP 510, Public Economics for Urban Planning. "When do economic theories inform us, and when are their assumptions bunk? And why wasn't my last Econ teacher half this fun?"   
• UP 406, Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Maps. Computers. Databases. 'Nuf said.
• Natural Resources and the Environment (NRE) 662, Seminar in Resource Policy and Administration, more specifically Localization: Adaptations for the Coming Downshift. "How will we build reliance and justice in the absence of cheap energy or continued growth?"

So, 5 courses. I know a fair bit of Econ and GIS already, so that helps. Part of the reason for taking the NRE course is to determine how much I want to focus my studies in that department/on those issues. The course has the most readings; it's also my favorite, the one I consider most meaningful.  Legal Aspects is a close second on both counts.

This weekend was dedicated to figuring out how much reading had been assigned, how far behind I was, what notes went in what notebook, and how much note-taking to keep using the laptop for. Result: I'm now caught up on readings (to last Thursday, plus most readings through this Tuesday); I will only take in-class notes on the laptop for the GIS course; otherwise the laptop is an expensive tablet (displaying all the readings that come as PDFs, and allowing me to mark up their margins).

Late this week is the Expanded Horizons field trip to Milwaukee for first-years. A general tour, three specific tours I chose out of the 12 (!) the second-years put together, a service project, and some time on a rented bicycle.  Also, 15 hours of time on a bus to do all my reading!

More in a week+, after I'm back...