He is rather heavily impaired by the notation, especially once you get beyond algebra, and the placement test thinks he should go for Calculus I.

"Okay, in light of that I think you should get a student tutor - someone'll want to have 'taught a Draak math' on their CV, even though we don't subsidize tutoring when you're not paying tuition. That'll catch you up on notation to use in your other classes and maybe in a math class later. You'll be handicapped in the math-heavy sciences but we can put you down for electromagnetism physics anyway, and comp sci and intro agricultural science and intro ecology and if you want to take five things the chem class - that's got notation too but doesn't get into the weeds about it at the intro level and it's less abstract, somebody in the lecture hall will be managing to think about actual chemicals most of the time probably."

I know math, it's just not your math! But of course giving me tutoring benefits the giver in some way. It only makes sense. Five seems like at least one too many classes... Might want to drop crop science. I'm not so much into crops. I'll be a resource for Draak who want to export food and save some land from becoming fields if I do, though, so... Yes, I'll keep it.

I'm paying tuition, aren't I? I'm going to pay to audit the classes? Or I thought I was. It'll be really interesting seeing what you teach in terms of ecology. It's a popular study among Draak and I think I would already know the basics, but again I can't be sure, so best to try it anyway.

"You're not paying full tuition which comes with extra resources like tutoring subsidy, sorry, I was unclear. Auditing is less expensive."

Okay. From my art sales I have - He gives a figure - And I think I can earn about a third of that per month surplus of rent and materials if I spend enough time making more, is it enough for auditing?

"It is, yeah."

Good. I want to audit those four classes but not chemistry. What now?

"Now I'll send you your class schedule - there. Any questions?"

Do I get library access?

"You do, yes."

Nothing else, then!

He looks at the schedule.

He has comp sci four days a week, and ecology two of those days, and physics and agricultural science on three days, so he has all the classes on one day but the others are sparser.

He thanks the registrar and goes about getting textbooks and syllabuses and figures out how to pay his fees and checks on an auction and then goes to the next class on the schedule. 

His first class is ecology! It's midsemester and they're talking about what happened in a certain region when the apex predators declined.

(He arrives early and introduces himself to people.)

He can get all their names back. Most don't have jobnames yet; the three Shians and two Shahns and two Nimos are disambiguating with florid adjectives.

He's friendly and attentive and mostly remembers names. Is the class session all lecture or some discussion?

It's a lecture and then breaks up into student-chosen discussion sessions. He can have his pick of them.

He picks one at the edge of the room.

Anywhere a Draak lives can't sustain as many apex predators because we ARE those.

"Do you wipe them out on purpose when you move in some place or do they just starve?" wonders one of the Shians (the Illustrious one).

It varies by Draak. Mostly the latter. It's rare for them to be wiped entirely from a region - and you sometimes make agreements with your neighbors where a range is split between your territories to only hunt one every season or whatever - we've noticed evolutionary trends toward smaller sizes and scavenging in a lot of predators, though.

"You must've been paying attention for a pretty long time to have noticed that," remarks a green called Afeh.

"When they starve does that tend to have effects on the existing scavenger population, and the fungi, and stuff?" wonders Illustrious Shian.

My species has been on Newhome for about four hundred years. I didn't specifically study ecology back home so I may be missing things, but yes - things change constantly in response to anything and everything, but predator population is a big one.

The discussion drifts to a debate about how an ecology might react to Amentans deliberately replacing the role of apex predators with hunting an equivalent per-prey-capita amount.

He sticks to clarifying questions for this part.