I’m currently in Week 4 of classes at Queen Mary, so I’m getting a pretty good sense of the academic culture here. I’m enrolled in three courses: Global Shakespeare, Victorian Fictions, and Adaptations (a theatre course worth thirty credits as opposed to the regular fifteen, which is why I’m taking three as opposed to four classes). One of the main differences I’ve noticed in academics at Queen Mary as opposed to at Northeastern has to do with assessment style. Here, our grades for each course are determined solely by the midterm and the final, so things like smaller week-by-week assignments and class participation have no affect on our grade. I’m sure that the time surrounding midterms and finals is going to be very high stress, but right now, everything feels much more relaxed than it does back in the States. It also requires a great deal of self-motivation, as I’m doing reading not so much for class each week, but because the subject matter interests me and I know I’ll need the information for the final.
Most of my classes are roughly the same size as the classes I’ve taken at Northeastern, and two are actually made up solely of study abroad students. I’m in my first large lecture course ever (Victorian Fictions), but we’re only in lecture for the first hour of the class, and in the second half, we break into smaller seminar groups of about a dozen students each. My Shakespeare course is just a seminar and Adaptations is a practical workshop, so they’re about the same size as well. Because of the smaller course size, I’m really getting to know my professors. There’s definitely more of an informal relationship than I was expecting between students and faculty members here, as everyone goes by their first names, and seminars are fairly casual as well (discussion-based, not a great deal of hand-raising, etc.) Luckily, I didn’t have to purchase any textbooks for my courses, and the novels I’ve read so far for Victorian Fictions I’ve been able to download as free e-books or buy relatively cheap from the bookstore. Because all my courses only meet once a week (with the exception of Adaptations, which also has a weekly student-led practice session where we create performance pieces/compositions based on instructions on the student portal), I am finding a greater need to take detailed notes in my classes, so I don’t forget information over the week that passes in between them. Spending less time in class is also giving me more time to explore the city, and I’m absorbing a LOT of British art, history, and culture by wandering around museums on my days off.
Signing off with my weekly highlights: seeing not one but two great plays (Art by Yasmina Reza at the Old Vic, and Buried Child starring Ed Harris at Trafalger Studios), visiting Churchill’s War Rooms, and going to the first meeting of the Playwright’s Society.
