Thursday, September 5, 2019 | Written by Karsten
When I make my class schedule for a semester, I normally try to get my classes all in the range from 9 am to about noon and make the beginning of the week heavier than the end of the week. However, this semester, I knew I would want to make my schedule a little different. Because Georgia Tech knows that students who take part in this program want to travel a lot, they give students Fridays off, for the most part, in the spring and fall semesters. The exceptions come on bank holidays and other reasons that we would have Monday off. In these cases, our Monday classes get pushed to the Friday of that week. I knew I wouldn’t want to take only electives while studying abroad, but I also did not want to take an entire course load of engineering classes. I settled by scheduling three classes that are required for my major, one class that will eventually complete my humanities requirement, and one 2000-level elective. I could have found a computer science class that begins the respective minor, but I’m still unsure if I want to do that. I talked to my advisor and the required classes that she recommended I take while
abroad were ME 3322 (Thermodynamics), MATH 3670 (Probability and Statistics with Applications), and ECE 3741 (Instrum and Electronics Lab). It worked out well that Thermodynamics meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 8 am, Probability and Statistics meets on Mondays and Wednesdays at 3:30, and Instrum and Electronics Lab meets on Wednesdays at 9:30, and none of these hinder travel in any way. For Electronics Lab, it was convenient that I had taken the lecture part of the class (ECE 3710) in the spring, so I have some of what we’ll talk about in my recent memory. Since the other two classes are not required courses for my major, I had a bit more leeway with what I chose. I knew I wanted to begin getting my humanities out of the way and I was likely going to take a language, so since I am studying in France, I chose FREN 1001 (Elementary French 1). French class 
meets on Mondays and Wednesdays at 2 pm, which means I would have to be back earlier, but it’s unlikely that I would be getting back that late on a school day anyway. Lastly, I picked Science and Technology in the Modern World (HTS 2100) because it is a study of European regions and because it begins to fill up my 2000 level electives. This class meets on Tuesdays at 12:30, and therefore also doesn’t affect travel in any way due to lecture, though there are a few fieldtrips that occur on Friday throughout the semester. A normal week for me this semester starts at 2 pm on Monday and ends at 9:30 on Thursday, which technically gives me 100.5 hours per week to travel out of 168 total hours in a week. Though I won’t be using all of this time to travel, as school does come first, it is reassuring to know that if I have an easier week ahead, I can make some pretty ambitious travel plans and still make it back with plenty of time for class.