I've survived my first week as a grad student!

Here's what my schedule looks like:
Monday, 4-6pm: Energy Markets & Regulations
Monday, 6-8pm: Intro to Energy Technology

Tuesday, 4-6pm: The Energy Problem and Sustainable Development
Tuesday, 6-8pm: Distribution Networks

Wednesday, 4-6pm: Wind Energy
Wednesday, 6-8pm: Intro to Energy Technology

Thursday, 4-6pm: Solar Energy
Thursday, 6-8pm: Energy Auditing

Friday: Labs (prácticas)



Right now I'm in the "Primer Cuatrimestre" schedule. The way the Master is organized is that there are 3 options: Renewable Energy, Efficiency, and Nuclear Energy (mine is Renewables). Out of the 2 options that I didn't choose, I had to choose one as my "optativa"; from this subject I take 2 courses (I chose Efficiency).

Language
Yes, all of my courses are in Spanish. So far, this hasn't posed too much of a problem although I was exhausted on Monday after 4 hours of class. My Wind Energy professor didn't speak very clearly and on top of that a lot of the subject matter was very new for me, so that course was definitely the most challenging. Needless to say, the next day I did a lot of reading on types of generators and the internal components of generators.

Classmates
There's about 35-45 people in the program right now. (The number is still changing because people are enrolling.) The majority of students are Spanish although there seem to be quite a few from Latin America (Colombia, Ecuador, and Costa Rica that I know of so far). Maybe 10-20% of the class works so I guess that's why our courses are all in the afternoon. There's also a few students from other European countries, but otherwise everybody speaks Spanish fluently.

Classes
Everything is structured relatively similar to the US and the courses I've taken at UCLA... the professors post all of their notes and presentations online, have office hours (tutorías), etc.

Here are some differences:
*One big difference is that there are no assigned textbooks, so in terms of cost this is huge.
*The grading system in Spain is from 1-10, where 10 is the highest. However, the passing grade depends on the professor and it's usually around 3.5 or 4 (whereas you would imagine it to be around 5 or 6 as it would be in the US). Since there's no curves though, I guess this helps a lot.
*No TA's!

I'll leave you with a little anecdote from my first day of class... the professor was discussing energy consumption and the very high per capita energy consumption in the US. A girl said something like "Well, that must be the case since everyone drives huge cars over there!" and he replied "Things are changing, and they're civilizing."