Grumbles

If we're going chronologically, we'll have to cover my Dark Days before we get to Oxford. If you're looking for the happy, fluffy study abroad stuff, go ahead and skip this post. Go read about Oxford!

Following Katie's birthday, I was plagued with a very serious case of writer's block. Which left me with a lot of time to sit and think and be frustrated. And all my sitting and thinking and frustration led me to this conclusion:

I am not happy with the academics here.

I'm not getting what I want academically from this program. Which was hard for me to come to terms with, because one of the reasons I chose UEA was that it was supposed to be an excellent university for English Lit and Creative Writing students. To be fair, I believe that this is probably true if you're a full time student planning on attending UEA for all three to four years of the degree. I also think part of it has to do with luck. Maybe I just didn't get a good sampler of the courses available, and I most definitely was unlucky with my seminar placement for 18th Century Writing. My seminar (one of four) is led by a recent post-graduate who does not have a lot of experience teaching, and unfortunately is not too skilled in facilitating discussion. So for two hours every Friday I sit in a room with nineteen other people who don't really know what to say about the texts we've been reading, with a seminar leader who doesn't really know how to spark us into conversation. And the lectures have been getting less and less thought-provoking and inspiring each week.

Early English Drama is surprisingly not so disappointing as 18th Century Writing. Creative Writing is a whole other story that you really don't want me to get started on. (Trust me.) But I don't feel like I'm getting anything from the courses here that I couldn't get at any other school, and would probably have a better educational experience in the same/similar courses at Whitman.

One thing I love about Whitman is that in all my courses, even the ones I've disliked and trudged through, I experienced some sort of personal growth or discovery. Even Calc. II and Global Media & Revolution! And I think that's an important and necessary part of the educational process. As of now, I've learned the most from reading Rilke and Pinter, which has been entirely in my spare time and vastly unrelated to my courses. (With Pinter, at least I'm being exposed to playwriting, which is helpful since I'm writing a play for my Creative Writing dissertation. So slightly related.)

So maybe there are more important things than academics. And maybe that's ok. (And maybe some of you have been telling me this for a while.) This has been somewhat of an unfolding realization for me over the past year or so, but I was hoping for something a bit more from UEA. Again, it was a large part of why I chose UEA in the first place. I was hoping to at least enjoy my courses on some level.

After dealing with all this for a week, my trip to Oxford came at the perfect time.

SNEAK PEEK OF MY DARLING CITY!