Back to School

I now take back any frustrations I ever had with the complicated systems of American higher education. Navigating the University of Cape Town's administrative procedures has been quite challenging at times, but nothing we couldn't crack the code on.

A glimpse of our beautiful campus at the University of Cape Town

From our first adventure to campus (with Lindsey & Alex)

A few small coincidences managed to make us laugh throughout the day, though. For one, we all sat quietly on the Jammie Shuttle (university shuttle system), reflecting on our exhausting adventure, when we heard a guy behind us speak up... in American English! Lindsey and I both turned to each other with the biggest expressions of surprise, as we hadn't yet stumbled into other Americans. We struck up conversation with them, and it turned out that they were beginning their semester abroad at UCT. We also managed to find a guy named Lindsay at the bank, and in typical form we both exclaimed, "That's my name too!" at the same time. As they say here, hectic!

American friends on the Jammie. Mike and Alex, maybe? Pardon my lazy appearance :) 

We knew we needed to pay our initial tuition prior to being able to do anything, but even figuring out how much you owe here is interesting. There's no invoice or student account to look toward; you simply figure it out based on your degree and situation. Yesterday we were sent from the Fees Office to IAPO (International Academic Programmes Office) to the Cashier's Office to the Fees Office to IAPO... only to find out we needed to make some adjustments at our South African bank before making the payment. Getting the voucher verifying our payment had soared from a small victory to a GIANT accomplishment in our books. 

That's Jameson, the iconic UCT building situated in front of the mountains

Today we adventured back to campus to complete our international student pre-registration, which was far less complicated. We did, however, have to entertain ourselves for unbelievably long queues, but we managed to meet people from Zimbabwe and Norway, which helped pass the time. 

The line for the IAPO pre-registration process

One of the more interesting observations I've made over the past couple of days is the abundance of international students attending UCT. For a short while I was rather mind blown by the number of people questing after the same things we were, but then I realized the difference. The US is a huge part of its continent, where South Africa is just a small portion of its continent. Being the top-ranked school in all of Africa, many students come to Cape Town from the rest of Africa (and further, of course) for their studies, resulting in long lines for international students. Rather interesting.