Extending stay in Omaha

Hey!

I extended my stay here in Omaha. Currently I'm busy with getting a bank statement from my mother and then I need to extend my DS-2019. Four months are just too short in my opinion, so I asked my university in Braunschweig if I can extend my stay here.

First they were against it but after I talked to Dr. Deepak (he is the dean who is in charge of my program) he talked with my university and finally they agreed with him. So now I will stay here in Omaha till May. I already took the classes for next semester. I will do Data Communications, Business Intelligence and a direct study in E-Commerce with Dr. Deepak.

Field Trip

Hey,

a few days ago, on 3rd November a group of international students with a scholarship went out to a field trip. We visited Valmont and Gallup. Valmont is a company which builds farm elevators. Their headquarters is in Omaha and they have over 8.000 employees worldwide. Following this link you can find out more about Valmont Industries.

One picture during our tour

Gallup is a non-profit organization which gathers data and delivers analytics, research and advice to help leaders to solve their most pressing problems. At both companies we got a nice tour. Gallup has a very nice building with a very interesting architecture. Here is a link for Gallup.

Group of international scholars

Homework, Homework, Homework

The last weeks I'm just busy with doing homework the whole time. After I got back from the Fall Break trip I just got tons of homework to do and there is a lot more to do the next weeks. I kinda underestimated the fact that you have still to do homework while learning for the midterms. Going to Yellowstone put me a little behind schedule but it was totally worth it. Unfortunately my laptops HDD broke and I couldn't do the open book exam for one of my classes. So I lost a lot of point which hurts a lot but I should still be able to get a B, which is a 2.0 in Germany, not satisfying but still okay if I consider that I lost about 8% of my total grade.

Currently I just have the feeling that the homework never ends. My class Managing the IS function is fine but my other two classes, were I have the same professor, have a really high amount of work. One of the assignments in Distributed Computer Environment was to create a PHP page. Since I didn't plan my schedule carefully I ran into time problems and just creating the webpage was really hard for me, since I never used PHP. It took me a long time but I finally finished it (and I got some help too), but I lost 20% of the points because I was late. Except the PHP webpage the rest of the assignments is easy but time consuming.

So there will be some weeks were I will spend the most of my time in the library, which is quite a nice place for studying. So for the future, I will plan my schedule so I always see how much work I have to do.