After moving into our new house last week, we've had a little while to get things sorted before the start of term. It's my second year at Exeter, so most things are familiar by now, but this year looks as though it's going to bring lots of new and exciting things my way.
As I've been writing on here for a little while now, I thought that it might be a good idea to blog about university life and so I got in touch with the people who run the university's Students' Blog and asked to write a few things for them. Basically, anything remotely interesting and/or uni-related will be linked across from there to here and vice versa (at least I think that's how it works).
So the biggest new thing that I'm doing this year is acting as the Education Officer for the German Society. My role is, as the name might suggest, more education- than social-orientated, so it means that I can avoid clubbing for the most part; sorry, I know, I'm a student, ergo I should like clubbing, but unfortunately it isn't really my cup of tea. But that means that I'm much more suited to my Ed Off role, as I like to call it. My main responsibilities will be running weekly conversation classes, where we'll teach and also learn some German with other society members and native speakers, and organising Stammtisch, which is a lovely, informal way of practising our language skills - really, that means that we all go to the pub and speak German!
With my excuses for not going clubbing already made, the main parts of my Freshers' Week comprised Joint Languages meet and greets, where the committees said hello to all the new and returning languages students and hopefully answered any questions they had, and the all-important Freshers' Fair - below is Katy, one of our Social Secs, and Chris, our President, at the fair on Sunday (photo credits to Dan, our Treasurer; thank you!). The Freshers' Fair is held every year in the Great Hall, the Forum and other parts of central campus and every society sets out a stall to help sign up as many students as possible. Our figures on Sunday - if I remember correctly! - were 65 who signed up to GermSoc, as I affectionately call it, on the day and hopefully many more who didn't want to brave the crowds and did it online. Also war er ein sehr erfolgreicher Tag!
Following on from that, my new role as Ed Off for GermSoc (do keep up, at the back!) has meant that I've been able to organise some volunteering, by way of running an extra-curricular German language club at a local primary school in Exeter. We don't start teaching until later in October, but three committee members and I had our introductory training during Freshers' Week with the wonderful Chris Wakely. He is a languages consultant, teaches the PGCE course here at Exeter and is the editor of the very exciting 'Take 10' programme, a teaching resource for primary school pupils which combines learning French, German or Spanish with physical exercise - and that of course meant that we were all dancing to such classics as Ich habe zehn Finger in a glass-fronted conference room in the middle of Devonshire House!
A big thank you also to Sara Bennett from the Student Guild for all her help and advice regarding the project, for purchasing the society's copy of Take 10 and for helping the four of us navigate those fiendish DBS forms!
When we were choosing our second year modules, months and months ago, a previous and clearly very optimistic version of Hayley decided that it would be a really good idea to start beginners' Russian. I think that that version of Hayley morphed into the why-on-earth-did-I-do-that Hayley around the time that my shiny new Russian textbook arrived in the post. Well, the time has come for me to actually open it and start learning some Русская, Русский or Русского - why are there so many different ways to say the word 'Russian'?!
Да, I had my second ever lesson of Russian today and yesterday's session seemed quite straightforward in comparison. On Monday, we learnt the five Cyrillic letters that look and sound like English ones and we learnt the Russian for 'cat', which is clearly the most important word I will need (it's кот, if you were wondering). But today, upon our arrival, we were designated new, Russian names. So as well as remembering to actually learn Russian, I also need to remember that I have a new name. Henceforth, I shall be known to my teacher Yulia and the rest of the Russian department as Galina, which is of course spelt галина. I'm hoping that I'll get the hang of it soon...
Way back in January, I took up French evening classes for beginners (because you can never collect enough languages - hopefully there'll be a blog post on this kind of theme coming soon...) and I'm picking them up again this year at intermediate level - argh! No, I'm really looking forward to starting French again, it's a beautiful language. I decided to start studying it mainly because I was just about the only student in the Modern Languages department who didn't do French in some form. My degree combination of German and Spanish seems to be quite an unusual one and, if I want to go into teaching after university, French will come in very handy. I'll have a couple of weeks to settle back into university life before the evening classes begin again in October, so I'm going to get back down to my books and try to practise lots beforehand!
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Added to all of this, I'm still doing a lot of the same things that I did last year, in terms of modules and actual uni work. Each student gets 120 credits to 'spend' on modules, so my Russian counts for 30 and I'm resuming 30 credits of German language and the same of Spanish language. But for me, the best thing about the ML department is its vast range of cultural modules, which we study alongside the core languages to broaden our understanding of history, literature, politics, philosophy and linguistics in the target language. Because I've already 'spent' lots of credits on three core language modules, I only have 30 left to use up, so I've only been able to choose one cultural module for each term, as they're 15 credits each. This term's is on literature during Franco's dictatorship with Dr Katharine Murphy, who taught the Spanish memory and identity module I took last term. Then next term I'll be studying ideology and identity in German cinema with Dr Chloe Paver, another fantastic lecturer whose first year module I studied last year. (Below are the books we're studying for Dr Murphy's Spanish module).
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And a few other things that are coming up this term at uni: Varsity football this evening, German Society's first conversation class tomorrow morning, Oktoberfest social on Monday and our first Stammtisch next Wednesday. And it's my birthday soon, yay!
I hope you enjoyed my first foray into student/uni blogging - and hopefully there'll soon be plenty more where that came from!
Bis bald and hasta luego.
(: xx
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