nanzan vs carleton

Nothing particularly interesting has happened in the past couple of days (other than having Thursday off for the equinox and going shopping then and Saturday, plus a phone call from my parents), but in the aforementioned phone call my parents said I should update more often, so here's an effort to do that. Also it's a good excuse for procrastinating on my schoolwork. :)

Since I've discovered that college in Japan is pretty different from college in the US, I thought I'd compare the two in this post (though that might be long and boring, sorry), though really I'll just be comparing Nanzan and Carleton specifically, since I probably can't generalize too broadly with my experiences. I'm currently in a homestay, as I'm sure you know, but actually this Wednesday I'll be spending the night in a dorm, because my host parents are going to Hokkaido and didn't want to leave me all alone in the house (or something like that). That should be pretty interesting and also probably pretty different from Carleton dorms, so I'll probably post again after that. Today I'll stick to campus and all that.

I'll start with some background for the two schools, which are pretty different even on a basic level. Nanzan is actually a 'school corporation' (or that's what it says in the brochure), including university, junior college (middle school), junior and high schools, and a primary school. Nanzan University has about 9500 undergrads plus around 500 graduate students, coming to a total of roughly 10000 students, while Carleton is only undergrad and has about 2000 students. Nanzan is also a Catholic institution (which actually I didn't realize until I got here, but I don't feel like it makes much difference in day-to-day life), while Carleton is non-denominational. Carleton is a liberal arts school, whereas Nanzan students can focus on things like law or engineering. I should note that I'm actually a student of the Center for Japanese Studies, which is separate from the normal undergraduate program; we have a required Japanese course and several CJS-only classes, though we do have the chance to take a limited number of 'open' courses with Japanese students.

Speaking of classes: the required Japanese course for CJS students is 8 credits per semester, while all of the other classes we can take are 2-3 credits each - you can tell how important Japanese is by the fact that it's worth 4 times as much as our other classes. We're supposed to register for 14-18 credits each, including Japanese, which I think is great because this semester I'm taking 5 different courses, instead of the usual 3 (or 4) at Carleton. Registration was a paper process, which surprised me, and the way they decided who could stay in classes of limited enrollment was by literally drawing names out of a bucket. I think I prefer the online-by-randomized-registration-number method, if only because it's easy to tell right away whether or not I made it into a class.

Moving on to the schedule. As a CJS student, I have Japanese class all morning and then all my other classes in the afternoon. Every class that isn't Japanese only meets once a week, for from an hour and a half to two hours and fifteen minutes at a time, depending on the class. As far as I can tell, there's a campus-wide lunch break with no classes from 12:35-1:30, which means everwhere is ridiculously crowded, and everybody also gets Wednesday afternoons off, which is quite nice. Granted, at Carleton it's possible to have afternoons or whole days off depending on the classes you take, but it's nice knowing that everybody is free at the same time. Nanzan is also weird and sometimes makes us have class on national holidays; I was told that the reason behind this is the fact that we get several days off for the university festival, so it balances out. Also I should mention that this is Nanzan's second semester; in Japan the school year starts a lot earlier, so the international students that are here for a year are really getting the last and first halves of two different school years.

Another thing: internet here is very bureaucratic and complicated; this may be a Japanese thing because internet access is (surprisingly) not as easily available or as cheap as it is in the US. Before using the computers we had to endure a long and boring orientation where we got our usernames and had to pick passwords that were exactly 8 characters in length and didn't use any words that could be found in an English dictionary (which was surprisingly hard to do, because even combinations of words in Japanese sometimes amount to English dictionary entries). We also had to agree to only use the computers for educational purposes (which I'm pretty sure nobody follows), and as far as I know nobody has figured out how to check our Nanzan emails yet, because apparently it can only be done from one building on campus. I also went through another orientation to be able to bring my laptop and connect it to the school's lan by cable (wireless is a different orientation entirely); I had to bring in my laptop and have them check it carefully to make sure I had anti-virus software and the latest versions of Firefox, IE, and Google Chrome. -.-'

The biggest difference that I can tell, though, is campus life. It seems like most Japanese college students are commuters, so they live with their parents but spend anywhere from an hour to two hours or more going to/from school every day (my commute is about an hour). Even the dorms aren't on campus; from my understanding they're not really Nanzan's dorms, but rather privately-run residences that are close to Nanzan - CJS arranges housing in dorms for their students, but I think for normal Japanese students living in dorms, they just had to find them themselves. As a result, nobody really lives on campus, which means there really isn't campus life. There are lots of clubs and always club activities going on, but big campus events like Carleton's Halloween concert or Mid-Winter Ball practically non-existent (I think); the closest thing is probably the university festival. This also means that on weekends campus is pretty much deserted, except for people doing club activities. I came to campus yesterday for a group meeting and all the dining halls were closed, the campus convenience store was closed, and even the library was closed. I guess if nobody lives on campus, there's no reason to have anything open on the weekends. But I still think it's weird.

Anyway, that's most of what I find different between Nanzan and Carleton, institution-wise. This ended up being a very long and boring post, so I apologize in advance to anybody who skips reading it just because it's too intimidating. Hopefully in the next post I'll have some insight into Japanese dorms, and maybe it'll be more exciting than this one. :)