Category Archives: Cambridge Experience

Not my best weeks

Some days are just not meant for you. It would have been better if you hadn’t gotten out of bed, and just let the world live without you for a day.

Sometimes this feeling lasts for weeks.

The last few weeks weren’t just not my weeks.  I get up at around 10 am, I go to university, I study until 2 am, I go home, I switch off the lights, I fall sleep at 3 am.

My brain does not work properly because all I can think about is work. Recently, supervisor told me that I should go out and meet friends, or take a long walk, because constantly thinking about my thesis and staring onto the screen, is not good. It is best for my work, if I took some time off.

I looked at her and said: Easier said than done. If I walk, I think about the structure of my thesis and how I am going to link the different parts I have so far. When I meet my friends, everything we talk about is our thesis. There is no escape!

Also, I get passive-aggressive comments on my drafts from my supervisor. I think she is slightly annoyed with me and my work. I am sorry, when I am in my genius mode (which I usually enter after midnight) I write things that are so intelligent and abstract, that no one can understand it. Including me (when I am not in genius mode).

Also, a duck literally shat on me. I told my friend to control her ducks better.

Some weeks are just not your weeks. But it will be all over soon.

(it’s still one of the best year of my life, I just need to complain sometimes 🙂 )

My personal nightmare

I am currently living a linguist’s worst nightmare: Stats.

Well, to be honest…it migth not be every linguist’s nightmare, but it is definitely mine. I am proud that I still manage to get out of bed in the morning. I’d rather pull the blanket over my head and pretend there are no numbers, frequencies, percentages and graphs waiting for me.

How did that happen to me? And I know: the graphs looks pretty simple and self-explanatory, but I guess it explains itself in a language that is unfortunately unknown to me. 

I am glad to have a friend who is friends with my enemy and helps me understand what df, within/between subject effects, approx. Chi-Square, and all the other things mean.

Last but not least, although I am about to embarrass myself publicly, I will share two stories of my life with the world. But before that I just wanted to say: First, it might look easy and straightforward to you… it does not to me. And second, I have other talents than maths. Just saying 🙂

  • I have spent hours trying to write about my analysis and all I have come up with was:

The statistical analysis with a 2*2*3 mixed model was chosen… because I was told to use it. (I personally think honesty is key to success^^)

I started calculating percentages (and when I checked if I did it right, I was told I did. So hooray! Three cheers for me!) when I came across these cases:

For 3 out of 10 items, word X was used.

For 4 out of 10 items, word Y was used.

(I guess you can already see where this is going… 😉 )

I calculated that for the first case 30% of the items were used with X. (Comes as a surprise to you, doesn’t it)

Then I calculated that in the second case 40% of the items were used with Y.

I look at the result… I stare. I stop writing. I realise how stupid I am. *facepalm*

 

Free time thoughts: Duck training

wild duck

A few hard working (yet super crazy) students decided to buy lunch in town and enjoy the warm and sunny day outside. Little did we know that a duck was about to eat lunch as well! So we threw some pizza and wrap crust into the grass for it to eat. The duck was so excited and would even run after sticks, because it thought it was food. It stayed close to us and as soon as we would lift our hands, it would run towards us. So we came up with a training regimen for ducks.

In a few years, they will be domesticated like dogs and horses, and we can tell our kids (or alternatively, as contemporary witness in a documentary): You know, back when I was your age, ducks were wild. Wild and ferocious. Thanks to the Damarian duck training, (named after a friend) we don’t have to live in constant fear anymore. Now, we can enjoy life! (Below: simplified Damarian training regimen for ducks)

ferocious duck–>domesticated duck

Emotional rollercoaster:Draft submission

So, I sent a draft of one of my chapters to my supervisor a few days ago. I haven’t heard back. I want to take you on a ride on my emotional rollercoaster…

Hitting the send button. There is no going back:

Waiting for an answer the first day, hoping for something saying: Thanks. I have received your mail. I will have a look at it soon.

No answer on the first day. No answer on the second day. Is it that bad? Is there so much to correct that it can’t be done within two days? Panic!

Still no email. Going crazy. What if my chapter was horrible? Should I go on writing on it? Or not? Or something else? AHH!

Me on a daily basis

Still waiting for an answer… everything will be ok. I know.

Wasting someone else’s place in Cambridge

 

 

Anonymous asked: So you get drunk, swear all the time and cant read? And you’re going to Cambridge? You’re wasting a place.

Well aren’t you quite the little charmer.

(Also, it’s ‘can’t’, with an apostrophe.)

As I am not on tumblr, I can’t officially like this or reblog this, but this is my way to pay tribute to The Cambridge Diaries. Not only do I think this is an awesome response, but the whole blog is hilarious. I find myself in almost every post on this site.

The only question left is: Am I wasting someone else’s place?

I can’t read… I am staring at articles hoping they will reveal their secrets to me. Usually I don’t knowing what is going on.

I swear all the time when I am sitting in front of my laptop, especially when I am with my Austrian friend. She is really a bad influence.

Thank god, I don’t drink. Makes me feel less bad for the person, whose place I took.

Stu(dent)dying

I have only been here a few months but that seems to be enough to find 100 differences (attention! figure of speech called Hyperbole is used here to exaggerate) between the Graz/Austrian and the Cambridge/UK way of studying Linguistics:

  • I think the most obvious difference between a Master’s degree here and in Graz is (apart from the final degree) the duration: I would have to study for two years in Graz whereas here it’s only one year.
  • And that is not even correct: I started in October and my course officially ends on the 14th of June. I have to end in my thesis by 5th of June so I study for about 9 months.
  • The average length of a lecture in Austria is one and a half hours. Enough time to actually learn something and definitely enough time to be late if you want to (Which means you can sign the attendance sheet without feeling guilty!) In Cambridge I can’t afford being five minutes late because that means that I would miss about a tenth of the lecture. Yeah,… that’s right: The lectures over here are just 50 minutes long and because one lecture kind of ends at the same time when the next one begins the professors usually start  (for all of you who don’t know: In Austria there is a 15 minutes break between lectures so that the poor students have time to change classrooms)
  • Here they have three trimesters instead of two semesters.
  • I was used to a mixture of lectures and seminars. Here, the first term was full of lectures and the second term was full of seminars. I had to sit in one seminar where I wasn’t even marked. You can imagine with how much enthusiasm I wasted my time (yes, I could have learnt something but the problem is that you have to read a lot of background literature to keep up. I had to work too much for seminars where I was actually graded for/in# so I didn’t have time and energy to focus on more than I needed to).
  • Cambridge is a bubble. Fact. Different people, who don’t even know each other, phrase it exactly in the same way. It’s a bubble of safe nerdiness. It shelters you from everything bad in the world. But it also isolates.
  • In Austria, you have holidays between the semesters. I am not even sure, if we have something like that here. Honestly. I remember that we were told in the introductory session that the timetable that we have is the one for Bachelor students, but that they are not going to stick to that. Today, I got reminded by my friend what they said about our breaks: A student asked: “Can we go home over the breaks?” The professors were first confused, then smiled and said: “You won’t have any breaks.” AND THEY WERE RIGHT!
  • In Graz, I was able to work a few hours a week while studying, which was a nice change between being taught and teaching someone (in my case). Here, we were advised not to work at all during the year and I see why: there is no time.
  • The library is huge! I believe Cambridge subscribed to each and every magazine and journal that there is. Graz…. Is not. What a surprise 🙂
  • In Austria, we were never pushed towards academia and research. There was no need to read articles and no one ever mentioned conferences or publishing. In fact, in the one seminar where we were forced to read and prepare one article each week, 5 people (including me as it was only an extra class) quit after one week. Here, they try to help you and offer the equipment to work towards this direction (most of the time at least). The feeling here is different, as everyone (especially your colleagues) is excited about your ideas and motivates each other to visit conferences across the world.Study party
  • In Austria, most of the students are not concerned with their grades. As long as they pass, everything is cool and it’s a reason to celebrate. They are not reeeaally stressed. In Cambridge, students take studying a bit too seriously. I have never seen so many break downs, the consequences of sleep deprivation, friends losing at least 5 kg in only 2 weeks (she had been super thin already… with her hollow cheeks and dark circles under her eyes she looked like a zombie), other friends getting kind of depressed every other day (that includes me as well), a colleague cut her hair because after she had come to Cambridge her former beautiful hair  became very thin and fell out others dread the deadlines for funds for their PhD and can’t sleep, one of my colleagues has started taking meds….  So if you come from a place like me where university is not the most important thing in your life… think twice how much stress you can deal with. Fortunately, I am pretty hardcore.:)

 

 

These are just a few differences, but I got tired of writing. Even if what I wrote sounds horrible, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I came here, because it was my dream and I would do it again. Always. What I am saying is that studying is not for everyone and is completely different in different places. I am enjoying my time as much as I can and I am looking forward to our after-thesis-time 😀