some observations on academics

I am seriously burnt out from all this studying--I can't take it anymore! I have been spending almost every day in the library for the past 3 weeks. Going to the library involves a lot of walking (about a mile each way, I'd say) a lot of money spent on food (I am not too keen on walking a mile back for dinner), a lot of quiet, a lot of headaches, not a lot of socializing. And that's just at Maughn, which is one of the King's libraries where they keep all the humanities books. I also occasionally go to Senate House, which is the library that the entire University of London shares, and the British Library, which is the one that the entire United Kingdom shares. Basically the thing that is both glorious and terrible about studying in London is that pretty much every single book in the english language is somewhere in the city, usually in one of the three libraries I just named. This means that you have absolutely no excuse for not reading any given book that may be helpful for your essay. If you complain to the professor that you can't find it, instead of suggesting something else, all they say is, "join the British Library!" Then you have to pretend like you aren't already a member of the British Library.

The thing with these exams is, you don't really study for them as much as you prepare for them. It's not like an American exam where you have a set amount of information and your task is to understand it and remember it long enough to scribble it down in a blue book. Instead, they give you the topic ahead of time which is really vague, and you do whatever you want with it. Usually the questions are along the lines of: "feminism in at least two modernist texts" or "the relationship between remembering and forgetting in WWI literature." like i said, really vague. so you decide which books you want to write on, and you do all kinds of research, and read the primary texts multiple times, until you come up with some sort of argument that is, if not actually original, at least presented in an original way. If this all sounds really familiar to you, it's probably because IT'S THE EXACT SAME PROCESS AS WRITING A RESEARCH PAPER. Only you can't write it down as you go, you have to remember it all and write it down in a timed exam. What I'm trying to say is, it's not a one-day process, and it requires your brain to actually be functioning the entire time, which I think is a lot to ask, even if it is worth 100% of the grade. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention it's worth 100% of the grade.

Although I think it's a pretty absurd system in a lot of ways, the one aspect I definitely like a lot is that you only have to read about what you're interested in. And I have to admit I have learned a whole crapload of really interesting stuff in the past few days. That said, this has been a horrendous week, and I am ready to give up completely on this nonsense and get on a train to Paris.

Also, tonight I ate chocolate hobnobs for dinner.