School is in!

Walking down the hallway, I pass groups of people speaking different languages I do not recognize. In class, the professor tells us not to take notes; he'd prefer we digest what he says, rather than focusing on scribbling it down: "6 months from now, you won't be able to make sense of your notes anyway." I spend four hours in the library looking for one week's reading for one class (there are no readers or textbooks for post-grads, you have to find all the original books and photocopy them yourself). The academic calendar is a mystery, with three terms, a month break in April, and things like "reading week" and "revision week." I still can't write the date correctly (7/10/10). And between noon and one, a line of people bisects the plaza as students wait patiently for a heaping plate full of steaming vegetables and rice, scooped out of ice chests stacked on a wagon, served up with a hunk of blueberry cake--provided free by the Hare Krishnas.

Welcome to graduate school in London.

It's been a bit of an adjustment to return to academia after being in the real world for four years, but it's been an even bigger adjustment to enter the academic world of a different country. The basic structure of lecture and tutorials (discussion sections) is the same, but the reading lists, the assessment methods, and administrative basics are foreign to me. The reading list for one of my classes has about 30 different articles and books listed for each week! The Miss Industrious in me started hyperventilating: "there is no way I can read all this for each of my three classes every week!" Luckily, it turns out you aren't expected to read everything. Phew! But you are expected to read most of it, as well as research additional pertinent sources. Should be good preparation for researching the dissertation (thesis). But with all the students competing for copies of books at the library, long queues at computers to access the electronic databases, and even longer queues for the copier, it takes a solid 4 hours just to acquire the reading material. And since the SOAS library doesn't have everything on my list, I have to trek all over London looking for sources. It takes ages just to acquire all the reading, which seems a bit archaic to me--though the British would say traditional (that's a compliment!). It's certainly more of an adventure and I like having a wallet full of library cards! Let's just hope it's still fun half way through the year.

What I'm taking this term: Food, Body, and Society (one of the core classes for my MA in Anthropology of Food), Therapy and Culture (looking at relationships of medicine, therapy, and the body with culture), Ethnographic Research Methods, and a Directed Practical Study that will consist of me doing an internship somewhere and writing a research paper. Term 2 will consist of Famine and Food Security, Food Development and the Global Economy, and the Anthropology of Urban Place and Space. Assessment seems to be based upon a combination of one or two papers/projects and a 2 hour examination at the end of term 2 for each class (including the classes from term 1). And then the big push to write a 10,000 word dissertation!

I've had two classes so far and I'm very pleased with the engagement, enthusiasm, and approachability of the professors. I think the program will be challenging, rigorous, and involve many hours in the library! The multi-cultural, liberal, ethnically and linguistically diverse student body makes SOAS feel like a smaller version of Berkeley but with a bit of the United Nations mixed in. It is exciting to be in a place not only rich in history but also rich in the diversity of cultures and peoples, especially for what I'll be studying.

At the end of my Therapy and Culture class, the professor had us introduce ourselves by saying our name and what food we dislike. "My name is Emily and I don't like tripe." Identity by name and food preference...I think I'm in the right place.