On Tuesday, I had my first "supervision" as they call them here. If you haven't guessed yet, it means that I met with my supervisor for an hour to formally discuss my first essay. This essay is the big kahuna of Michaelmas (fall) term-- 5000 words on the "relationship between biological, cognitive and social factors in development."
Okay, so back to my supervision-- students of the Education Faculty have been told over and over that you "Must Be Prepared!" for every time you meet with a supervisor-- do your reading, know the material, be ready to ask questions...Yeah, well, let's just say, my supervision didn't go as planned. It wasn't completely my fault, I actually had done some reading, it was just the wrong reading-- I apparently was pretty far off the mark in researching-- what I thought was-- my topic. Luckily, my supervisior is a Professor whose primary interest is in Special Education. Anyone who studies Special Education is usually pretty understanding. So, it didn't go as badly as it could have.
In fact, it was going pretty great when my supervisor suddenly said "I think you should write 1000 words based on the readings I just gave you (note-- this is like 9 books of reading!). When do you think you can have that done?" Now, I was going to say...maybe 10 days? Ummm...nope. She decided I had to have it done by the following Tuesday-- less than one week.
Needless to say, I've spent the last few days gathering every book (my current total is 11) on her reading list. Now, a lot of these books are spread out into every one of the Cambridge University Libraries-- every college has its own, every faculty has its own, too, PLUS there's the big UL (University Library).
Each library has its own policy on who can take out the books, how many you can take out, and for how long you can take them out. I have 3 library cards-- one for the Medical Library, one for St. John's Library, and one UL card (which also works at the Social and Political Science Library). The downside of having books spread all over the place is trying to a) find the library and b) trying to find the book inside the library.
The good news is-- the more libraries you belong to, the more books you can check out! The other downside, you have to know when you need to return the books to each library and remember to do it.
I'm proud to say that I have officially checked out too many books-- if I only belonged to one library that is, which I don't...so far I belong to 5! Yay me!
On that note, I really should actually read the books I took out of the library. I'm hopefully going to dinner in 30 minutes and then to a debate at the Union on Iran. Ah...Cambridge...
Thursday, November 1, 2007
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