It’s SO easy to forget that Northeastern university is actually a pretty big school. Everyone is always going in and out of co-op and you never quite know who exactly of your friends is on campus until the semester starts. That being said, when I first got to Goldsmiths, I was a little shocked to see that their campus library wasn’t as big as the Snell Library Fortress that I’m used to back in Boston. It’s set up in a pretty similar manner to the NEU library, with group study spaces and a quiet area among the stacks of books, but just scaled down to reflect the fact that there’s way fewer students enrolled at this school than NEU. The library is probably my favorite place to study. It’s close, open 24 hours a day, and has plenty of usable space. Fun fact: I only RECENTLY, after 9 weeks, discovered that the Goldsmiths Library was open 24/7. I kind of just assumed that being open 24/7 was a common trait among US university libraries and not of those in the UK because I have friends at other schools around the UK that had mentioned that their libraries close at around 10PM or so. I’m glad that’s not the case. I can’t imagine how annoying that would be, especially since I feel like it’s SO hard to focus when I try to study for my classes in my room.
The interesting thing about being on a study abroad, is that sometimes you’ll be put into classes that you didn’t originally think that you would take. While I am a music student, I’m here at Goldsmiths taking classes across multiple departments: music, sociology, and media/communications. I think my favorite class that I’m taking right now is my Cultural and Culture studies class. It’s a first year course in the media/communications department and basically examines and critiques how we as a population look at culture and how we interpret our day to day surroundings. What’s been most helpful to me, is that even though I’m in my final semester of university, I’m finding that this first year class has helped me tie together a whole bunch of concepts from my entire degree program. I’ve been able to learn more about more specific elements of cultural theory and narrative and representation that I’ve seen come up throughout my studies, but never really had the opportunity to trace back to their roots until now. I guess it just really shows the importance of diversifying and taking classes across disciplines.
