hmpf | Entries tagged with university

... while surfing the jewellery web in the last couple of weeks or so:

- Every good idea I've had, someone else has had, too.
- The same goes for every bad idea.
- Most jewellery out there I find vaguely uninteresting.
- A fair percentage I find ugly and/or *profoundly* uninteresting.
- A small percentage I find intellectually/artistically interesting but otherwise unappealing.
- A very small percentage I actually like. This is mostly stuff that looks like something I have made, was planning to make, or might have thought of but haven't yet.
- Even some of the stuff I like I find vaguely 'boring' - because it, too, has been done before/is being done all over the place.
- So far I haven't discovered anything that gives me the kind of feeling of desperate inadequacy that the best writing I read gives me. When reading, I often get a painful reaction of "I wish I'd written that/I'll never be able to write like that." Not so with jewellery, even though I am *not* a technically very accomplished goldsmith, thanks to lack of practice and experience.

So, to sum it up:

1.) Originality probably doesn't exist - or if it exists, is such a rare stroke of luck that putting it at the top of your priorities is a recipe for making yourself unhappy.
2.) My ideas are neither better nor worse than those of most other goldsmiths out there.
3.) When it comes to jewellery, I may actually value useability and aesthetic pleasure slightly higher than originality and artistic value.
4.) I think I can actually live with being average, in this area of my life. I have absolutely none of the (unhealthy?) ambition here that I have when writing.

Also:

If I'm completely honest with myself... I don't think I care about university half as much as I care about goldsmithing. Considering I've almost completely abandoned goldsmithing in the last few years, (at least nominally) for the sake of university, that is an alarming thing to realise. (I already knew that I cared about writing far more than I cared about uni, which is also alarming.)

One conclusion to draw from this that I should abandon any idea I still have of doing a Ph.D.

The other conclusion is that I need to find a way to integrate goldsmithing into my life again, and to keep it a part of my life - as I need to keep writing a part of my life; both of which may be difficult or even impossible to accomplish, considering I also need to start earning money reliably and in sufficient amounts very soon now.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I have a thesis topic now; it's not very well defined yet, but it's a start. This is good news: it means I can start doing my research now - well, not quite now yet, of course, as I'm still writing my last essays; but very soon, anyway. I'll start doing research in November, probably.

Which means I'll probably be able to start on the actual thesis in February.

Which means I'll be done with uni by the end of November next year.

(What's the topic, you ask? Something to do with American indie comics by women - mostly Finder and the worlds of Donna Barr, I think. As I said, it's not all that well defined yet.)

Current Mood: good

I've made noises about the massive amounts of uni work awaiting me in the very near future before, here and elsewhere. I know I've been studying for so long now that sometimes it must seem to observers as if I would never finish, but the fact is, this summer the tsunami of Finishing Uni crashed into me full force.

This event was not entirely unexpected - the timeframe's been clear since sometime last year. And in fact I've already done a fair bit of work, earlier this year; it's been a busy year for me at uni even without the "added value" of another bunch of deadlines, and I did know that it would only get busier as the end of the year approached. But I kind of hoped/expected that I'd get one last chance of catching up with some private and fannish stuff before the tsunami struck.

But then time did that annoying thing it sometimes does and kind of fast-forwarded me through summer, and a few weeks ago I realised that in fact, This Is It. The great marathon that will only end with the last of my exams has begun. This last exam will be either in November next year, or in March the year after that. I'll be insanely busy until then either way - even if I get those extra four months I'll have to spend them working non-stop, and under non-stop, mounting pressure, because time's already short. (It always is.)

(If I sound overly dramatic here that's because I'm scared out of my wits.)

So. I'm not sure what this means for my life here. I'm not sure what this means for any part of my life that does not directly involve university. I rather suspect it will mean that I'll drop off the face of the earth even more completely than in all my previous instances of gafiating. I rather suspect that before long, my energies will run low and there will be none left at all for anything not connected to writing my thesis and preparing for exams. I find having a life and being a good student hard to reconcile even under the best conditions, and these won't be the best conditions.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: Nicolas Lens: Flamma Flamma

This sounds like pretty much the perfect concept for a true academic education (shame it's all male; shame also there's only one of it):

http://www.deepsprings.edu/index.html

Now I'm dreaming of a world that has thousands of little colleges like that (because the system of academic education as it is at the moment is deeply broken).

Any opinions among the academics and students on my flist? I find this idea fascinating.

Current Mood: amazed

Now, after taking the staggering amount of four years (normal: two) to finish my 'Hauptstudium', the main part of my studies in one of my two subjects, I'm thinking about trying to finish the main part in my *other* subject in less than one (normal: two - of course, those are usually the *same* two years in which your also finish your other subject.) I'm quite old for a student, even for Germany (and we have the oldest students in the world, I think), and with every semester I spend at university, my chances of finding a job - and/or getting a Ph.D. - are diminishing.

If I write one big paper and one small paper this semester, a second big one in the holidays, and the last, small one in the next (and last?!) term, and start preparing *like crazy* for my thesis during that last term already, I *could* manage to get my proposal in by February next year. Which means I'd be writing from, err, I think March through August, or possibly October. Final exams in November.

Oh, and I have to wedge in another excavation somewhere, too, because I'm still missing two or three weeks of dig time.

The one drawback of this approach, aside from the fact that it means non-stop stress until November 2008 (and we all know how well I deal with stress... *sigh*), is that I'd have to rush writing my papers, which might result in not-so-great grades, which might diminish my - already slim - chances of being able to do a Ph.D. (ETA: no, wait, I'm stupid. Or rather, tired. Actually, the grades don't have anything to do with my final grade, so I should be fine. Whew.) Also, I haven't laid much of a 'foundation' yet for a thesis - I have no idea at all what I might write about (or rather, I have too many ideas, and they're too vague), and I feel I still need to read a great deal more 'theory' before I can really even start thinking about formulating a proper question on any of the topics that I find interesting.

(Dammit, why am I suddenly crying? I'm not unhappy. Not even all *that* scared. It must be the music. Or possibly the momentary relief of feeling a hint of determination. I'm sure that determination will pass, though. I'm not good at remaining determined, and nineteen months is a long time.)

ETA: If I manage this, then by the end of 2008 I'll have completed a five-year course of study in just under seven years (eight, if you count the year abroad). Granted, I changed one of my subjects, but even with that change it shouldn't have taken me longer than six years at worst.

Still, better seven years than seven and a half.

Current Mood: scared
Current Music: The Tolkien Ensemble: Galadriel's Song of Eldamar

you're making it hard to keep up my enthusiasm for you.

*sigh*

There are fifteen seminars being offered this semester in American studies.

Five of them take place on Tuesday between four and six p.m.

These also happen to be the only ones that are 1.) interesting, 2.) fit into my plans of what I want to do in my last couple of terms of uni (and possibly in my thesis), 3.) didn't require signing up months in advance, and 4.) that I haven't already taken earlier.

So, I can only take *one* interesting seminar this term. Which means I need to fill the rest of my required classes with a) stuff that bores me to death (19th century stuff; the rise of unitarianism; art criticism; objectivism in American poetry) or b) stuff I've already done.

This is not only annoying because I'll be forced to waste time I could have spent learning something interesting learning about stuff I'm not interested in instead; it's also highly inconvenient because I'm still not sure what I'm going to write my thesis about, and was hoping that some seminar would give me an idea. Seminars on objectivism in poetry are unlikely to do that, as I'm interested neither in objectivism nor in poetry. Nor am I willing to write my thesis about the 19th century, one of my least favourite periods in history, and art criticism isn't something I can see myself getting interested in, either. American religions, on the other hand *are* kind of interesting, but that particular seminar is the third in a series, and I didn't take the first two, so I'd be missing the foundations.

They probably put all the interesting seminars on the same day and time because they guessed that those would be the most popular, and they wanted to force students to take only one of the interesting/popular ones and then take some of the boring/redundant/ridiculously-specialised-in-areas-few-people-care-about ones, too.

Gotta love German universities.

Current Mood: frustrated

It's ten years this year since I finished school - thankfully, nobody seems to be planning a big reunion at the moment, or I would have to decide whether to go or not. ;-) Well, for some reason I got curious about some of my schools' and universities' websites today, so I looked them up. Turns out almost all of them at least *have* a website now - for some, that was definitely not the case when I still attended them! So, here they are for your perusal, should you be so inclined. A glimpse of my Real Life.

- My primary school: Gruneliusschule Frankfurt, 1983-1987 (no website - probably because most schools seem to rely on their students to build their website, and primary school students can't do that kind of thing yet. ;-))
- My, uh, for lack of a better word, high school, 1987-1996: http://cms.carl-schurz-schule.de/ (Really badly designed website. I see they still haven't managed to renovate the library, either, if the pictures are to be believed. It was that same shade of vomit green when I was there. Frell... nine years of misery. Well, okay, six years of misery and three years of okayishness.)
- My first university, 1996-1997: http://www.uni-kiel.de/ (swanky!)
- My, uh... how'd you call it? Ah, never mind... 1997-2001: http://www.zeichenakademie.de (That website didn't exist when I started studying there, which is a bit embarrassing considering they're a design school!)
- My second university, 2001-2003 and 2004-present: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/
- My sort-of-third university, 2003-2004: http://www.bham.ac.uk/default.asp
- I also occasionally study here, thanks to a cooperation agreement between that uni and mine: http://www.uni-mainz.de/

There. Now wasn't that exciting?

I'll make up for it with a con report later tonight. ;-)