Daily Life of a Student

Ok, I have a few minutes but I thought I would give you a quick glance at my past few days. This is first week of Michaelmas (pronounced Mik el mus for all those wondering) and as such, I have been running around like crazy. I alternate between walking on air in the clouds because I am rushing to class at Oxford and feeling completely overwhelmed and inadequate because I am rushing to class at Oxford.

The way my course is set up is that there are two core courses every Master of Studies in Modern European and British History takes. Then I have a Early Modern Britain Seminar, lectures and language and skills training as needed. The core courses are Theory and Methods, where we talk about the different theories and methods of historiography and some of the cutting edge techniques. This can be interesting, but also frustrating because its easy to make something much more complicated than it is by giving an idea really fancy names. The other course is Sources and Resources and that meets for the first time on Friday but so far we have been asked to look at some training for plagerism and some journal articles. The first article was written addressing a certain topic in Elizabethan England, the second by a different man challenged the first authors conclusions, saying they were wrong and the article was a load of rubbish. The first man responded and so we get to talk about historical arguments. My seminar this week is on the Restoration of Charles II. I have several book chapters that I have been looking at and will finish up tomorrow morning.

As far as lectures go, I want to go to as many as possible but....that isn't necessarily the best plan. There are several history ones that I will be attending and some theology ones on Luther, Calvin, and maybe just for fun Barthe and Bonheoffer. Finally the language and skills training include further Classical Latin, some Medieval Latin reading, Intermediate French (if I wanted I think I could move up to the Advanced group! I would not have guessed that but my grammar is good enough...I think.) and paleography. I will be taking a real course for that next term in Hilary but for now I am looking online at a training that the National Archives has.

Other than all of that, and trust me, I'm tired and out of breath most of the time, I just gave my first Rotary presentation to my home club of Eynsham. It went very well and I really enjoyed getting to meet the group. I think there will be a couple activities that I will be able to help with throughout the year. Tonight I have a swim test to be able to be on the novice women's rowing team for Keble and over the next few days I will be trying to simple stay on top of things. This weekend will be very exciting, on Saturday I will get to dress up in sub fusc, white shirt, black skirt and shoes, my academic gown and black string tie and go to the Sheldonian where all the freshers at Keble College will be officially matriculated into the University of Oxford. The ceremony is in Latin so the next question is...how much will I understand?

Thank you all for listening (reading rather) and talk to ya'll later.