My Third Week in London

The time to add and drop classes is over. Luckily, I was not one of the people who needed to add or drop a class. My UH study abroad advisor, Allison, did a fantastic job getting my classes scheduled before I got here.

On Mondays I have Project Management. First, I go to lecture for an hour in the afternoon, and then I have a short break before going into seminar for two hours where we split up into groups and work on small-scale projects using the concepts we learned in lecture. Today we talked about the stages of team development and started forming ideas for our final project. There is an interim assessment coming up in a few weeks so my group has a lot of work to get through before then. We are going to use some aspect of the building of the London Zoo for our project but must research further before we solidify our plans. Because it opened in 1824, information may be limited. There is a recently completed project dealing with the expansion of the lion’s enclosure that looks promising. 

On Tuesdays I have People and Organizations. Again, lecture first, short break and then a two-hour seminar. The set up is very similar to Project Management; however, we have not been given our final assessment yet. It may be a project; it may be a paper. Hopefully we'll find out soon. 

Wednesdays I go to my required history class, taught by Marcus Daniel, the University of Hawaii professor who came to London as our advisor. He is from London and the information about the city and country he shares with us has made the transition painless. I am taking his Black Britain history class and I love it. Currently we are reading the book The Zong, by James Walvin and it is fascinating. It goes into great detail about the business of slave trading between Africa, the UK and the Americas, but also touches on the business versus moral side.

Thursday is a fairly easy day. I have Intro to London Theater for two hours in the afternoon. This is the London Studies class I chose for my culture and I absolutely love it! Every week we go to the theater to see a live production. Each production is different from the others. In class we discuss the play we saw and also different ways in which the theater, as a whole, runs. The business aspect of the theater interests me more than the acting part, so I focus my studies on that. For our final assessment we have to write a research paper about the theater and I already have my professor's permission to write about the business side of things versus the stage perspective.

Last week I saw three performances! The first was with my theater class and called Nine Lives, written by Zodwa Nyoni, directed by Alex Chisholm, and performed by Lladel Bryant. It was a one-man show about a gay man who fled from his home in Zimbabwe due to intense homophobia to seek sanctuary in the UK. It was an intense production, full of emotion, but definitely not my cup of tea. I am not an extremely "artsy" kind of person. My classmates all agreed this was an "artsy" type of play.

Next I saw The Phantom of the Opera, with music by the immensely skilled Andrew Lloyd Webber, and directed by Harold Prince. It was an amazing piece of theater! The study abroad social program at the University of Roehampton put on this outing.

And finally, to end my unbelievably wonderful week, I went to the Cambridge theatre with a couple of my flat mates to see Roald Dahl's, Matilda. Matthew Warchus directed this play. He did a fantastic job bringing the book to life on stage. The kids in the production were extremely talented!

The best part about London so far is everything. I am so thankful I get to study business abroad, not only in my business classes, but also in my history and theater classes. So far I've touched on concepts I previously learned in my honor's leadership class, statistics, business finance, and economics classes at the University of Hawaii. I am eager to see where in the future my knowledge from London comes into play.