After the university intro, we moved to a designated room for the mock lecture. Kano knew the campus so I wasn’t going to get lost.
“I knew on paper, but walking the campus — Sahoda is huge.”
“Comprehensive single-campus university — it has to be big.”
Sahoda is at this Shinjuku location only — twelve faculties across humanities and sciences, around 18,000 students. Cross-faculty interaction is a selling point.
“Moving between classes must be exhausting.”
“Oh? You’re already imagining yourself enrolled? You’re that eager to spend college life with me?”
“It’s a hypothetical.”
“Sure, sure.”
She was beaming. Sahoda is a reach for me. Shinshiroike is a decent prep school in Tokyo and even being fifth-in-year gets me a D-grade — Sahoda is that hard.
Kano getting in straight out — on regular admission, not AO or recommendations — is incredible. The class that graduated this March had massive non-passers.
We reached the lecture hall. Way bigger than a 40-person high school classroom — easily 100-plus.
“Hmm — where to sit…”
“For a serious lecture, the front. Back rows are where the slackers go.”
“Wait — really?”
I’d assumed Sahoda students would uniformly be serious. Apparently no.
“Heisei and Seiyou are the same.”
“The college students get lazy rumor is real…”
Top private Heisei, mid-tier Seiyou — same. So some non-serious students exist regardless of school tier.
”…Wait, the mock lecture is for high schoolers like us — apart from irregulars like Kano — so there shouldn’t be slackers here.”
“Oh right — it’s the open campus mock, not regular. Slipped my mind.”
(Was she pretending or had she really forgotten?) The lecture started — Political Economy, Microeconomics — very substantive. Partial derivatives and total differentials made appearances. The kind of math-allergic refugees who fled to private humanities would cry.
“Partial derivatives in microeconomics — math-allergic private-humanities refugees would die.”
“Yeah, that’s a common credit-loss.”
“Kano, you’re cruising through these — wait, are you actually Political Economy?”
(I knew she was Foreign Languages, but the way she breezed through the board problems…)
“Took microeconomics this spring semester actually.”
“Ah — that’s how.”
She’d cross-registered. The intro had mentioned Sahoda allows that.
After the lecture we headed to the dining hall. Sahoda has several — we went to her pick.
“Here.”
“Huh — not crowded.”
I’d braced for an open-campus crush. Less than expected.
“This one’s hidden on the map — others get the load.”
“Oh, a hidden gem.”
“Yeah, I come here a lot. Good and cheap.”
Even current students struggled to find it — open-campus visitors more so. We got food tickets quickly.