Mammal Hall

Today I wanna show you Mammal Hall which is one of the buildings at the UNO campus. Mammal Hall is a pretty new building, but I'm not sure when it opened exactly.

Most students have their business classes there. It has some study rooms which are equipped with a nice big table, a TV that is connected to a PC and far more comfortable office chairs than we have in our rooms here at University Village. Students can enter them with their MavCards (Cards from UNO for the students) or book a room.
There is also a small cafe and a lot of vending machines for snacks and drinks. This place is also perfect for just relaxing. There are a lot of relaxing zones where you can just hang around, but you can also study there if you want (hehe :D). I would like to have one of the couches and one easy chair in my room.

So here are some pictures made by a friend.

One of the entrances

Just awesome. More comfortable than most living rooms!

On the left you can see one of the study rooms

Perfect for having a look at the documents before a exam! 

As you can see a pretty good place for studying!

Finals Week

The semester is nearly over and everyone is learning for their finals. I had a lot of group works and assignments to do the last weeks but now I'm finally done with it. So I have a lot of time to prepare my two exams, which feels kinda weird, because I have more free time during the finals week than before. I guess that's a good point of having many projects.

Most students will return to their home countries after the finals week and some are going on a trip during vacation. I will meet with my sister and two friends in New York and after a few days we will visit Miami Beach and last but not least we will visit Nassau (Bahamas).

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.

Fall Break

Finals are over and its time for the fall break here in Omaha. We had two days off (15. & 16. October) and we used these days for a trip to Yellowstone. To be precise we started on the 11. October and went back on the 17th October.

We were a group of 10 and we drove over 2.000 miles these days. On the way to Yellowstone we visited the Bad Lands National Park which is in South Dakota. After this we visited the Mount Rushmore National Memorial and the Devil Tower. After over 20 hours of driving we finally reached our cabin in Montana. We were surprised at first because most parts of Yellowstone are located in Wyoming and we thought our cabin will be in Wyoming too.

Our cabin was really nice, equipped with a sauna and a hot tub. Unfortunately we didn't have time to relax there because we wanted to see as much as possible of Yellowstone.

Kitchen of our cabin

Yellowstone is full of geysers and every few kilometers the landscape can change. So instead of writing too much I just show you some nice photos Felix made.

Midterms

A pretty big difference between studying in Germany and here at UNO are the homework and group projects you have to do the whole semester. You get points for different things. For example for handing in papers, for presentations, team projects, quizzes or other types of homework. It's also common to have more than one exam. You normally have one exam in the mid of the semester (midterm) and one at the end. Some classes have even more exams and in one of my classes I have no exam, just group works and individual short papers.

The midterms are in the first two weeks of October and everyone is studying a lot for it and there is also homework to do. Which is another difference to Germany, because if you have exams, your normally finished with the course and you don't have to worry about homework.

I personally prefer the system here at UNO over the experiences I had so far in Germany. Since I do the things I learn in class I can remember all the things better. In Germany it mostly feels like the following picture. Most students learn a few days on high pressure for their exam and then forget most things after that. So everyone who watched Men in Black knows what I mean.

So lets see how it works with the midterms. Right after that I will go to Yellowstone with some friends, so you will hear from me after that!