Classes Begin

Yesterday I started my graduate level classes. I haven't had to do too many things for hours at a stretch this summer, so taking three multi-hour classes in a day was a bit draining for me. I am sure I will get used to it once I get in the swing of things, it's just that I now know that the entirety of my Tuesdays from here until December will be completely spoken for.

Here's a quick rundown of my classes:

Economic Applications in Urban Studies: This course name is rather lengthy, but it's really a fancy way of saying Urban Economics, or Urban Economics for planners. I like the professor so far, Greg Schrock, and it appears that he definitely understands how economics and planning may sometimes seem diametrically opposed, but must be appropriately balanced in practice. I may have had enough economics background to waive the requirement for this class. Freeing up space in my schedule would have been nice, but I think that I will enjoy this class and am glad that I get to take it. Economics and its cold rationality and penchant for pushing market solutions to problems provides a nice balance to planning, which can sometimes get impractical with its squishy utopian ideals.

After Econ I had about five hours between classes, so I elected to work up in the office for a few hours making phone calls to prospective families for the Family Activity Study. I wasn't nearly as successful as I have been in the past in making recruitments, but I did well enough.

Planning Methods I: This class appears that it will also be numbers based, with a focus on how to obtain data in order to better inform planning. Our class project, an in depth study of the active transportation needs of East Portland, will carry over through next term into Planning Methods II. To be more specific, we are looking at the large swath of Portland east of I-205 that was annexed in the 80's and 90's. It's a geographically large area, and much different than the dense closer in neighborhoods that people normally associate with Portland. To be honest it's not really an area that I would care much for living in, but that doesn't take away from this being a great opportunity for us to hopefully provide useful data to help improve it.

History & Theory of Planning: It was about this point that classroom fatigue had started to set in. I had already been at school for about 8 hours, and only had a 10 minute break between Methods and this course. Our professor, Sy Adler, or just Sy, lectures more traditionally from his own notes rather than powerpoint. He jumped right into things and we were learning the vast majority of the class period. I had thought that this class might be a little repetitive for me since I had had prior planning classes, however this will not be the case. The way he presented things and way he wanted us to consider and think about things is much more of a thoughtful exercise then anything I encountered in my undergraduate planning classes. My previous classes were just a straightforward presentation of history, facts and things that occurred, whereas this lecture focused much more on how and why things should occur.

After about 2.5 hours straight of lecturing he broke us off into groups by specialty with the intent of us forming smaller groups of 4-5 people with a recently implement plan that we were to focus on. There are 14 people in the transportation focus, which meant it took us much longer to identify plans that people were interested in, and then paring down the interested people into groups that were small enough to meet the Sy's requirement. The first group to organize was, no surprise, for the Bicycle 2030 Master Plan. A little while later, a few of us drew numbers from a hat to see who could be in the Portland Streetcar Plan group, which I luckily made the cut.

Of all of my classes, the last one probably concerned me the most in terms of workload. This may have to do with my fatigue at having been at school all day, or possibly because of how oddly the syllabus was organized. Still, I have only have three classes to worry about, so that's certainly less to juggle mentally then back when I had five or even six classes a semester.