Anorgasmia
Masters degrees are harder than bachelor’s degrees. This is not something I had anticipated. Foolish as it sounds, I simply hadn’t given it any thought. I have spent god knows how many years in education and I have dealt with each incremental increase with relative ease and success. This time it’s different.I can honestly say that for the very first time my quiet confidence in my intellectual ability has been shaken lose of its foundations and is now quietly floating around the web searching for an inspiration that never seems to come. The web is a horrible place. I am addicted to information. Over the years I think my brain has been saturated in news and statistics to the extent that now when I try to actually put the thing to use all I can squeeze out is a jumble of incoherent and irrelevant anecdotes.
I am the youngest person I have met that is doing their masters. I am one of only a small handful of English people. I find myself persistently unable to uphold a conversation on academic subjects. Everyone I meet incessantly refers to authors, ideas and theories of which I have not got a clue. It appears World War Two, and indeed the world, is infinitely more complex than I had previously believed.
On top of all this it seems that Americans, of all people, are typically the most travelled, informed and academically aware students. That is not how things are supposed to be, how dare they refuse to live up to their stereotype. That is not what Arkansas taught me to expect. Perhaps it’s the extra year they spend graduating or perhaps it is merely the front that their education system, heavy on famous authors and dates, provides them with.
More likely is that these people are genuinely the elite. I have never seen more students from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale and Berkley in such a small space before. I have never been overly proud of the word ‘Essex’ but now it is almost unbearable to hear myself say it.
In order to survive at this level I am going to have to work excessively hard. Not only do I have to know the specific weekly topic inside out before class but I also need to get myself up to speed on the academic and historical world as a whole, both inside and outside my chosen period of study.
But as they say, and when I say they I mean me, hardship is simply an opportunity. And now that for the first time I have lost that quiet arrogance I actually feel a lot better about things. No longer do I have to partake in the unspoken competition that occurs between friends and colleagues, for I simply fail to qualify for that race. An inner calm has descended. I feel at ease with the world.
Right now there is just me, eleven months, and a global library of people, books and sacrifice. A save point? Quite possibly.
p.s. I love that poster.
posted by Benjamin Nakizo @ 12:02 pm
3 Comments:
I like this entry. :)
If it makes you feel any better, I struggled hugely for the first year of my degree. I spent months trying to scrape a 2:1. And look what happened in the end! Sometimes the trick is disregarding what everyone else is doing and playing to your own strengths. Which might not lie in a comprehensive knowledge of the entire span of human history. Personally I've never had much time for that sort of "intelligence," which is really just general knowledge, and no substitute for analytical thought and expression.
Incidentally, do you regret your first university choice?
Do I!?
Boy, I had hoped this much was clear a while back. While I had a great time at Essex and would never dream of exchanging in all the people I met there for a second chance at another university I do think that Essex was a failure of imagination. Colchester is probably the one place on earth that is marginally worse than Ipswich.
Plus with my A-Level grades I could have probably qualified for far more exciting universities - possbily in London.
Although - a monkey could probably get straight A's at A level so long as they chose the right courses.
This regret partly lay behind my decision to a) go to Arkansas and b) do my Masters as far away as possible.
But I can't bad mouth Essex too much, it has a special place in my warped and distorted heart :)
"I do think that Essex was a failure of imagination" - I always wondered why half the people I knew went there. It was almost as though it was the default option.
Whenever I visited, my overwhelming feeling was that it was an extended Sixth Form college. So it was cosy and comfortable, but not exactly a masssive stretch for its students, I imagine.
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