With two full weeks of classes under my belt now I'm beginning to realize just what I've gotten myself in for, and it is rather overwhelming! I have been taking classes at my university for a year, but being an actual student changes it all, especially since I have a thesis to write! But let me backtrack...
This term I am taking four graduate level courses - sociology, social education, museum management theory, and a general thesis-related course (plus a few other random credits). I am also taking two undergrad level courses for the curatorial certificate - basics in education, and introduction to lifelong learning. I am also TA-ing (which means assisting the professor with the hands-on portion instead of actually teaching myself) the 4th year curatorial certificate course. In addition, I am still working at the museum. They are currently keeping me busy with updating part of the archival database and translating documents for a special exhibit this summer, as well as working on various tasks related to the meetings 4 of us will be attending in the US at the end of May. My life would, of course, not be complete without Girl Scouts. My Brownie troop meets roughly twice a month, our latest meeting was our year-end (the Japanese school year runs April-March) event, when we went to see a Japanese production of the musical "Anne of Green Gables" (or rather "Akage no An."
So that is my life in a nutshell. Busy. Full. Exciting. Great fun. Challenging. I love it, and about once a day find myself questioning why the heck I ever thought I could do it in the first place. Little things - like not being able to properly express myself on the weekly response sheet for my education class, or watching the discussion of Foucault rapidly go over my head in the sociology class. And yet, those times are balanced with the other times when I realize I can get most of my reading for the social education class WITHOUT MY DICTIONARY, or am able to get through my self-introduction and thesis outline presentation in front of the entire department without making a fool of myself. I really appreciate being part of a community again. I miss not having other students around me studying similar things (I'm the only museum studies person, there are three M1 students in education, 13 in psychology, and none in sociology, add to that another 15-20 M2s in ed/psych/soc and a couple of doctoral students and you have the entire graduate population of my department, the name of which I translate as Psychology, Sociology and Education). But, I am still finding I belong to a community, as I get to know the other grad students in my department and run into my friends in other departments on campus. For somebody who has moved around as much as I have, this feeling of belonging, to a place and to a group, is one to be truly appreciated!!
As far as classes themselves go, undergrad courses are lecture-based. Most seem to have no assigned text, although some of my courses have had them. Some professors take attendance (with slips of paper where you fill in your name, student number, etc) and include this in their grading, while in other classes grades are based on a combination of short essays, response papers and/or exams. My graduate courses are all small, the largest having 5 students. They are more discussion based, but differ from the general discussion type courses I took in my previous graduate incarnation. The norm here is that one student will be assigned to make a presentation each week, based on a reading that the entire class will have read, or something read only by the student presenting. He or she will then talk for about 30 minutes (normally reading from prepared handouts, my father was amazed to hear nobody uses powerpoint here), before opening it up for discussion which is normally dominated by the professor. I have presentations coming up in three of my four graduate courses, and I'm more than a little nervous about it all...
And then there is my thesis... I presented my initial proposal at a department-wide meeting a week ago. In a few days I will be meeting with my advisor to decide on a schedule for the next year, and to discuss a more detailed version of my proposal. It is all very exciting, but it looks more and more like I'm going to be writing in Japanese, which is a little bit daunting!
No comments:
Post a Comment