As any student will tell you the Christmas holiday can be a dilemma-laden fortnight. You know you’ve got a job lot of assignments to hand in/exams to sit in January, and yet there are so many pleasant distractions doing the rounds. Still, despite these minor issues this has been an unusually productive winter period for yours truly, and thanks are due largely to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). If they hadn’t sent such a lamentable excuse for a team to Australia for the Ashes I’d probably have lost an awful lot of sleep to the cricket, as was the fate of my January revision over the winter of 2010-11 when England won down under. This year, along with thousands of other disgruntled cricket nuts up and down the country, I usually gave up long before my sleep pattern took any real damage. I imagine bedrooms up and down the nation bore witness to a chorus of “forget it, I’m going to bed” (or various more vulgar and less publishable alternatives) at around 1am GMT every day of the test series.
Anyway, as seems to be a habit I’m quickly developing on this blog none of this has an awful lot to do with an MA in Human Geography. There isn’t even a tortured metaphor or tenuous link to suffer through this time, I just felt like having a good moan and with a measly 42 Twitter followers (@okemp1889) this seemed a decent extra outlet. Still, back to business.
The order of the day at present is the Dissertation Research Proposal (DRP), arguably the most stressful submission of the whole year as it requires one to compress an idea which has taken months to formulate and intends to spawn a 15,000 word paper into a measly 2500. This year the process is more interesting than last time around at undergraduate level because, unlike that often ill-informed 2nd year assessment this one has to be watertight. More challenging still, it has to be marked outside of the discipline of geography at Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) faculty level. This means the writer has to be absolutely clear when expressing ideas and define terms in very clear ways such as to be sure that the right message is communicated. Being a bit of an old cynic I initially saw this as a way to make things more difficult for me (A. Einstein – “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education”) but it does encourage better, clearer writing, and this will certainly be an advantage to you going forward, whether this is to further study or the world of work. Perhaps another morsel of wisdom from old Albert is more appropriate then; “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
That’s all from me. See you next month for more borderline-relevant musings.