On studies (1)

  I have classes only on Monday and Wednesday mornings and the whole days of Tuesdays. That translates into 8.5 hours per week. I say “only” because the class hours are short compared with other programmes in the university, and compared with what many of my friends and I would expect.

Upon hearing this you may find my masters programme very relaxing, or TOO relaxing. One can procrastinate or play a lot. One can spend a great deal of time on a part-time job. One can travel frequently even during term time. Etc, etc. Indeed I once thought before formal classes began that I could make occasional short trips using my consecutive days off from Thursday to Sunday (four days!) and that I could do quite some freelance journalistic work. I totally disbelieved it when our lecturer told us in Week Zero that we had to do the course as a 35-hour-per-week full-time job. (I worked far more than 35 hours per week when I had a full-time job!) But upon receiving the reading lists in Week One I found the workload was in fact much more than what it had appeared!

 

Every alumnus told me “Don’t study too hard” and even our lecturer told us not to read the two articles when she dispensed the photocopies to us in Week Zero. “Just relax and don’t worry about reading anything. I don’t expect you to know anything when you come to the first lecture,” she said. Out of curiosity I did read those two articles (which were planned for discussion in later parts of the term) before the first class, finding them extremely abstract. But I didn’t check the reading list for Week One. Then after the first week of lectures and seminars I suddenly discovered that we were supposed to do the readings for Week Two before the second lectures and classes of each unit - which effectively meant I had lagged behind the timetable for Week One readings! Suddenly I had to catch up with two weeks of reading within a few days. But what was even scarier was that when I went to the university library to look for the books on my reading list, I discovered that the majority of the copies were checked out. So do all my colleagues study so hard that I am the last one to reach the bookshelves? I can’t quite believe I’m the laziest among a class of 50 people… (To be continued)