To Begin, Clubs. As I told you last post, I attended the Fresher's fair and during which I signed up for a multitude of clubs and societies, though not nearly as many as most people. The main clubs which I have interacted with so far have been a choir, the archery club and the role playing society.
To begin with the choir, the culture of choirs are so different here. I think this may not be so much a difference between England and America, but probably the difference of a small college and a big university. There are so many different choirs and a good chunk of them are actually paid jobs of minimal stipends. As a result, there is a high bar of professional musicality to join many of the paid choirs. I did sign up for one choir with an audition, but unfortunately gave probably the worst audition of my life. It also doesn't help that as a first soprano, my voice part is probably the easiest filled in any choir. Given that the bar is set higher than I feel comfortable with as a casual singer, I have decided to join the Regent's Park choir which is a casual choir open to all of Regents. I am ok with this decision, and hopefully when I return to William Jewell, I can pick up where I left off and sing perhaps more frequently. I did however attend some of Sara's auditions, one of note was at Exeter college in a gorgeous chapel (pictured below). The acoustics were amazing as well and I couldn't help but take a few pictures like the tourist I am.
Another bonus to resolving to do less choir is that my time is already going to be filled with many other clubs, in particular archery. Students who had attended the University of Oxford last year, many of which who were similarly at Regent's Park or Mansfield, did archery and expressed to us back at Jewell that we should give it a try. This past week were free introductory lessons in which your eye dominance was tested and new members got to try shooting. As a right handed person, it is my natural inclination to fire a bow while holding it with my left and pulling back the string with my right. It turns out, however, that I am left eye dominant, which may explain why my left eye has progressively worsened at a greater pace than my right, and as a result, I am one of the very small percentage which should fire with my right hand holding the bow and my left hand pulling back the draw. Of the four ranges in the gym, three were devoted to right eye dominant and one was devoted to left eye dominant. I was most certainly inaccurate initially, as I began to practice proper stance and positioning. The bows that we had were fairly low weight, meaning that the pounds of weight we had to overcome when pulling back the string were low with the two bows we had being 20-25 lbs. After a few rounds of shooting though, everyone felt more comfortable with the bows and there was immense joy in being able to draw back the string, aim at the target, feel the rush of letting go, the release of weight, and the satisfactory thud as the air hit the straw target. While I have a long way to go before I am any good at archery, I could see it becoming a life long passion. I imagine that the power is one that someone feels when firing a gun; but the finesse of pulling back the bow and aiming all is really what speaks to me and makes me appreciate the marksmanship of archery over that of a firearm.
My week was also punctuated with meeting with the role playing society. This quite easily 60-70 member society makes me smile every meeting. \There are quite a few characters and I know I will make some lasting friendships here. Every Tuesday is the society game, which is pretty much an ongoing LARP like the ones I do frequently at Gencon, the largest role playing convention in the world which is in Indianapolis, my home town, every year. I am pumped to get started and our first session consisted primarily of character creation. Today is the first meeting for table top games, and every Sunday there will be games as well. I am looking forward to trying out new systems and maybe even leading a few Dresden Files fate one shots. On Saturdays are your more traditional LARPs. And while foam sword fighting has never really been my cup of tea, maybe one weekend I will give it a try. So with potentially three events a week, even this club is going to keep me pretty busy.
But what is most important is not my clubs, even though they make me really happy, what is most important are the classes and by that I mean lectures, tutorials and seminars. Given that my neurobiology lecturer was too busy to tutor me, and informed us last minute, I resolved to attend all the neurobiology lectures, in addition to a few lectures on topics that interested me. These included, philosophy of the mind, philosophy of science, a seminar on RNA, DNA and protein lab techniques and then all of the neurology lectures. The first lecture I went to, early Monday morning, I was nearly giddy to be in something resembling a class. Science is really different no matter where you go. Rather, science is in many ways universal. Jargon is the same and ideas are often the same, and a university where cutting edge research is going on, the lecturers really know what they are talking about. It was probably the most familiar thing I had had since coming to the UK and it made me ridiculously happy. Lectures are most often an hour long and a majority of them occur all at the same place. The information is normally used in conjunction to a tutorial on the same topic and the lecture is really an information dump. It is in tutorial that discussion happens on the topics. Seminars are often twice as long as lectures and involve the opportunity for questions and discussion. For science, this break down is perfectly acceptable and I don't mind the lack of discussion in the lectures. For philosophy, I find the process exhausting and less interesting. In America, my philosophy courses have traditionally been almost entirely discussion based and hearing a lecturer stand up and talk about ideas and then in many senses make an argument, just makes some part of me want to jump up and ask questions and have a discussion. I will probably still attend lectures, and have to get my discussion fix from my fellow students, or wait until I actually do have a tutorial on the topic.
So speaking of tutorials, my first philosophy tutorial is this coming Thursday, with my first paper due the Wednesday night before. Given how much time I have had with the topic and how little competing work I have had, I am way ahead of schedule and should have no trouble finishing on time. On the other end of the spectrum, a science tutor has been found. She is a DPhil student and is working on putting together 6 tutorials on ion channels and topics of neurology. The best part about this is that she does research of similar topic to the research I would like to do one day. So maybe if I'm lucky she will let me be her lab grunt and help her out in the lab. To make up for the remaining tutorial, the lecturer whom I had been going to see on ion channels, offers as least one tutorial on ion channelopathies during the term. Regent's Park and I reached out to him and he made special arrangements to provide me with the opportunity to take at least one of those tutorials. This is a sigh of relief, and before I know it, I will probably be busy with work for the coming term. Regent's Park and particularly Dr. Robson have been so accommodating and have worked so hard on my behalf and I can't thank them enough. Similarly, William Jewell has been in the loop and have been equally supportive making sure that my time this first term is properly compensated when I return and worked into my curriculum. It was an unfortunate rash of bad luck, but I just had to let it go and move forward.
To conclude this post which I have realized as gotten rather long, I want to talk broadly about why I think studying abroad is so important. It came to me this morning, as I jogged through the city, that I have met some amazing and diverse people. I am making friendships which will likely grow to last my entire life. I think that the reason studying abroad makes one a more global citizen, is not the experience of being in a place not so different from your home and yet so different, but it is the realization that half way across the world, there is someone who knows your name and cares about you as an individual. These connections create a web of awareness that makes you want to come back to this foreign place and makes the idea of going somewhere far away all the more accessible. As nerve-racking and terrifying as being dropped in a new place with only a small hand full of people you know is, I know now, after only two weeks, that this experience will change my life for the better.
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