Foreign Perspectives

Although the English course that I’m doing at the moment has the reputation of being the hardest course in the university, I’m finding that as I go through it I’m picking up speed and seem likely to get to the end of the course something like three months ahead of schedule (which is some going on a nine month course!).

Yet, whilst I’m moving along at a seemingly hectic pace (and, no, I’m not skipping sections to do that), others are saying that they’re falling further and further behind. Why? Funnily enough, it seems to be a result of my history of doing language courses which appear to have covered a good deal of the material before, albeit either in French or Spanish. Most of the others are approaching this English language course with a history of English literature courses behind them which, of course, wouldn’t have covered that type of material.

Whatever it is, I’m now around 75% of the way through the course and planning on taking a week out to do some revision and to complete the next assignment.

What this experience has shown me is that there’s little point in reading about the experiences of others of particular courses in isolation from their prior experience. For example, when I look at the forum for the phychology course that I might be doing next, I see that many people on that are saying that they’re getting behind too. Aside from not knowing what prior experience in the field that they’ve brought to the course, there’s also the bias towards forums being places to air problems as opposed to saying “I’m doing great”.