Opening Ceremony for Masters

What an incredible day! :) Today was my "first day of classes" which ended up being a beautiful opening ceremony for my masters program: Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language. I never imagined it being so formal-- and I can't even begin to describe how amazing it felt to walk through the Facultad de Filología (School of Language and Literature) of la Universidad de Salamanca as a student. Here I have included pictures of me standing outside the room where our opening ceremony took place. You might be able to see on the walls behind me in the picture below that there are names of people with a design for each. I learned today that they are names of people who have achieved their Doctorate in the school. The lettering is red, which I heard is supposedly "la sangre de un toro" (the blood of a bull.)

The ceremony took place in a beautiful lecture room (inside the door in the picture on the left labeled "AULA MAGNA") where I got to meet my fellow classmates and professors. I felt so proud to be there, especially after I found out that 180 people applied to be in the program and only 34 of us made it! I also got a very big surprise!!! This whole time I thought that it was a 2 year masters program-- but I was wrong!!! They recently changed it to a one year program so I am going to get a Masters Degree out of this!!!!! :)

That is definitely good news, but I'll tell you, it has made me SO much more nervous!! Although the professors all seem to be nice they were also very intimidating because they kept explaining over and over again how important it is in this masters program to study and do work outside of class. I also found out today that our Final Research Project is due June 7th, 2010 and I felt sick to my stomach. I know it's not that close, but it's really not that far away either!!! I just feel so much more pressure now, and since I am not a native Spanish-speaker I feel even more nervous about being able to do all the work!

Despite all of my nervousness about the actual work, I am so excited about the group I will be surrounded by because we are a very multicultural!! Although the majority of the students are from Spain, I am the only student from the United States, and there is representation from Chile, Iran, Greece, Mexico, Italy, South Korea and Canada (that I know so far!) And the most amazing part is that our uniting language is Spanish (not English as usual) :) After the opening ceremony we all went out to a local café to have a drink and get to know one another. I am so excited to get to know everyone better!!

I got my schedule for classes today and it looks as though I have classes in the evening Monday-Thursday (some time between 4pm and 9pm) and then some Fridays I have class in the morning, in the evening, or no class at all... it depends on the week. Not too bad looking right now... but we'll see how I feel in a couple of weeks ha ha!