The student body is going to be a real hodgepodge of individuals based on the student information I've been given. There are some restrictions on who can enroll, with the minimum age for dwarves being set at 14, and demons have been set based on a set of equivalent minimums being beyond a certain prestige of goblin, or having evolved beyond it. Those requirements are in addition to showing aptitude. Over time, I expect the distribution to normalize toward the lower end of the minimum requirements, but the first group has a lot of older individuals in it.

We ended up with far more applications than we could reasonably handle. Based on possible scheduling and the number of instructors we have, I determined that we shouldn't exceed 400 new students being admitted in a year. We had well over 4000 applications however, meaning I had to establish criteria and get help filtering all the applications. The criteria that I established for the first round of selection isn't necessarily what I'd want moving forward either.

I wanted students who would be flexible and able to adapt to changes over the highest possible aptitude in their field. Since we'll be making a lot of changes to things on the fly for the next year or more, I wanted to ensure that the first class, which would have the most tumultuous experience, would be able to adapt to the changes we make. Even when accounting for that fact which normally favors younger individuals, the first class is going to be skewed towards older individuals just due to the sheer number of them that are applying.

I also had one of the scribes take a tally for me of the different age groups of applicants, along with their backgrounds and which areas of study were being applied to. While right now we have way more applicants than we can deal with, it's good to have this data so I can start making determinations on which areas of study should be expanded and how many new students I might be able to expect to apply year over year. One year's data point isn't enough to do a good analysis, but it at least gives me a feeling for it.

During this school year, construction will mostly be focused on expanding the nearby city to accommodate faculty and student more completely. With the faculty having made such a fuss over entertainment, that will be one of the many things we'll be expanding. When we take in students next year, however, I plan on directing some of our construction efforts to expanding the academy based on collected applicant data to prepare us for the future.

I'm expecting the first round of ships to start arriving any day now, and they're expected to keep arriving for a while. We're technically in the middle of what will be winter break moving forward, but given the uncertainty in how long it'll take to actually gather everyone up and transport them, we've opted to have far more trips to and from the mainland for this season than we will have in the future. Its an unfamiliar experience for many of the dwarves on the mainland as well, and since very few people would be able to give proper advice on making the journey, we wanted to provide as much opportunity as possible.

I would have thought that the students coming from remote regions would be the ones that arrived later, but it was the opposite. Perhaps because they were concerned about the potential length of the trip, the students who were accepted from the most remote regions of the dwarven continent were the ones who arrived first, with the ones coming from the capital or the coastal cities only arriving in the last few weeks. Classes are supposed to begin in six days, and save for a few exceptions with extenuating circumstances, all the students have arrived.

The student body for this first year is made up of about 95% dwarves, and 5% demons, specifically 22 demons out of the 400 students. Not only is the dwarven general population much larger than ours, but the amount of translators we have is minimal, and our workforce is already limited. While I would have ideally had mixed classes of demons and dwarves, the language barrier makes that difficult. So while there are some select classes that are mixed throughout the day, we're limited to having demons taking part in courses where a translator is present.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

This also applies in the opposite direction, unfortunately, limiting us further. While a few of the demon instructors are slowly learning dwarvish, not all of them speak it, meaning the translators are basically going to be busy for 8 hours a day, four of the five days in a week. I also, reluctantly, accepted in a handful of noble's children into the program at Kao's insistence. My concern with anyone of noble descent is the same flexibility problem that I'm trying to solve, so I'm worried about potential conflicts that might arise if we change things on them, but they'll just have to deal with it.

As far as the actual courses that these students will be taking, we purposefully also selected students in order to concentrate them within a handful of selected education paths, rather than having them spread out among everything. All the demons, for example, are enrolled in the engineering course, per my preference. Many of the dwarves were selected to go through pathways related to leadership and business, which seemed pertinent to help with rebuilding the continent.

In related news to that, we've secured an agreement with Kao to connect their capital with our trade city via rails. They agreed to pay for the rail cost and installation, but that included an agreement related to those funds. The agreement was that any citizen transportation costs between the dwarven capital and our trade city would be nullified up to double the amount that they pay for the rails themselves. While that initially might seem like a weird exception that loses us money, I can see where it is coming from. Basically, since the capital would be connected to our trade city, it's likely that a large number of the dwarven students will be taking that rail line at least once a year. If we were charging for specifically transporting citizens between the two locations, it'd be like the dwarven government subsidized us charging their citizens for access to the rails.

It'd likely take a decade or more for us to actually nullify that sum, but since we'll be using the route for goods transport more than civilian transport, it isn't really a loss either. There were dozens of other small rules put in the agreement as well, but the important part was that we'll be connecting a rail line between two cities on the dwarven continent. The hope is that after it is completed it'll be much easier to convince them to connect even more locations via rails. At that point, it'll be necessary to add rail construction and operation as a course at the academy, but that's years away from now.

The first two weeks did not go well. The first of many problems were instructors not keeping to their allotted time windows for courses. It'd be one thing if we hadn't gone through all the trouble to install clocks in all the instruction spaces, but we did. The problem seemed to be isolated to handful of the dwarven studies professors who were previously employed at the dwarven academy before the war.

I had been concerned that keeping control of the student body would be my main concern, but teaching the instructors how to teach ended up being the bigger issue. When they started keeping to their allotted times, they decided to do that by not taking any questions in order to ensure that they covered everything they wanted to for a session, which was just as bad. So for the foreseeable future, twice a month I'll be hosting staff development days on days off, where for half a day I'll be working on teaching the teachers.

Other classes also had issues that needed to be resolved as well. I also had plenty of work to do adjusting my own classes that I teach. For the first time in quite a long time, I've actually been sleeping. For years now, I've been utilizing my ability to sleep half of my brain at a time while doing simpler mental work during the off times. Due to the amount of mental work I have to do trying to solve these problems, I need every possible hour of full mental capacity. I'm hoping, however, that after another month or two I'll be able to revert back to not needing to sleep. There are plenty of construction tasks that need completed around the academy that justify me working on them after all.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.