"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.

Seeker has a general announcement - this offer is not just for Tapa, and anyone interested can meet him about it.

The Senate has authorized limited technology exchange. He is allowed to explain nuclear fusion to Amentan countries that seem like good ones to know nuclear fusion, if they will send teachers and engineers to the Draak planet to teach any Draak interested. Nuclear fusion is a step towards starships, since you need it to build the right powerplants.

He is promptly mobbed by green petitioners, many of them extremely anxious and urgently wishing to tell him something that they aren't telling the blues!!!

.....Alright, then.

It's a pretty technical subject, the blues can wait a bit.

The greens nervously inform him that there is lowkey a physicist conspiracy not to get too into nuclear fusion because they think there will be demand for weapons and that the weapons would be very bad!

...He wasn't planning on sharing weapons technology, there is a kind that is pretty much good for only power generation. Maybe it would allow someone to make a ship that never needed to refuel but that's about as dangerous as it would get initially.

They didn't know that on account of the conspiracy but they're glad it's not a concern.

He is... Somewhat concerned despite that, actually. You could theoretically get back around to first principles and eventually come up with the weapons that way. He's glad they warned him, he will think hard about it.