Busy Bee

I realised I haven’t been writing much lately, but I’m trying to keep up :)
I am very busy with my modules at uni at the moment, so I didn’t really get to do much else.
However, I have just planned a few exciting activities that I hope will be a lot of fun.
 
First of all, I booked a ticket for a day trip to Manchester on Saturday. Since I’m up here in the north already, I thought I should try and see at least a bit of it.

 
Then in the end of March I’m hopefully participating in a “Zombie Run”, an event the Students Union is organising. I am really looking forward to it and I hope it will be as much fun as it sounds like :)

And finally, April and therefore Easter break is getting closer pretty fast, which means a LOT of fun coming up! Juju will be here soon, together we will go to London, later I will spend a week in Groningen, NL and as if all that is not enough, once I'm back my parents will come here to Newcastle to see me ^_^

As I said, it will be one hell of a busy month and I can't wait! :3

Hannah goes... academia

I think it's about time I tell you a little more about Newcastle University, how things are done here and how that affects my everyday student life.

 

Armstrong Building, photo taken by my friend Chia-Ling

 

First of all, I should tell you a bit about my classes. This semester I’m taking 5 modules, 2 from my main programme (CCC) and 3 from my pathway (IBM). For those of you who haven't read it before or who forgot, CCC stands for Cross-Cultural Communication and IBM/IM for International Business Management.

The most important module I'm taking is Methods of CCC Research. It's the only one I will have across both semesters, because it’s connected to my research portfolio, which will include my final works for the Master's degree. The module consists of one 2hr lecture/seminar (a bit of both really) plus 1hr seminar per week which only started last week, but will continue next semester.

outside the King George VI building

The other module for my main programme is Language & Cross-Cultural Communication, which consists of one 2hr lecture and a 1hr tutorial for discussions.

For my pathway, I’m taking Principles of Marketing, for which I have a 1hr lecture twice a week and a 1hr seminar once a week.

Business School lecture theatre

Business School lecture theatre

Then there is The International Business Environment. This is one 2hr lecture every week, except for 2 weeks within the semester, where we have a 2hr seminar instead.

And finally, I chose Managing Across Cultures, which is the only module I could choose. All the others are compulsory modules. This module includes a 2hr lecture per week (until 2 weeks ago, now I don’t have any more lectures for this module), and also four 2hr seminars throughout the semester, of which we spent 2 seminars watching movies related to the topics and one seminar holding group presentations.

As you can see, not all of the lectures and seminars are held weekly, which also means I do not necessarily have the same schedule every week.

The other thing I would like to mention is the NU grading system. Assignments are marked on a scale from 0-100%. Some of you might think that this is not too differently from grading systems in the US then, right? Wrong! Although it does seem like a similar system at first, it’s a little more complicated here...

First of all, anything below 50% is a fail. However, if you score 40-50, you get the chance to repeat an exam, essay or whatever the assignment might be, but no matter how horrible or excellent this repetition might turn out to be, it will always be marked as 50%. (at least it's better than getting a 0%). Then 50-60% is a pass, 60-70% a merit, and 70-80% is a distinction. 80% and over is very rarely given (none of the CCC professors have ever given anything better than an 85 in their whole careers, and even those were rare exceptions). A piece of work awarded an 80 or above would be considered worth publishing. So in reality, the scale doesn’t go up to 100% but an 80 is almost like a 100 already, and the lecturers told us to not be too disappointed when we get back our first assignment, and to keep that scale in mind.

view from a library window

A tour around 'toon'.

The 4^th week of teaching is already over and I realized I have not written a single word about university, the campus, or anything really, that has happened since teaching started. To be honest, I was so busy trying to get used to my schedule, the classes and student life around here that I didn’t even get to write anything. The first few weeks flew by so fast and there is so much to tell that I don’t even know where to start.

How about starting with the end? ;) My Masters’ thesis aka dissertation. I was very delighted to find out that I will NOT have to produce one single document as a dissertation at the end of my studies. Instead, what I have to prepare for my programme of study is a “research portfolio” which consists of three individual research files which are prepared and handed in at different stages throughout my studies. This makes me a lot more relaxed about the assignment. Since the individual research files are a lot shorter than one dissertation would be, I can work on it a lot better without worrying too much about getting a low mark and therefore a bad degree.

Another thing I really like here is the university staff and how they position themselves in relation to the students. It feels like the student-teacher relationships are much more on a personal level than what I experienced in Germany. Beginning in the first week, for example, one of our lecturers told us to please refer to him as ‘Peter’ rather than ‘Professor’ or ‘Mr S.’. He even said we could come up with other nicknames for him, as long as they are not too insulting.
 

Let's come to the campus. Since my main programme (Cross-Cultural Communication aka CCC) and my specialised pathway (international business management) are each organised by different schools, I have to move around campus a lot. The CCC lectures and seminars, which are managed by the School of Education, Communication and Language Science, take place in the various buildings on main campus, whereas the lectures for the business modules are managed by the Business School, which has its own building a little further off. The Business School is located next to the football stadium of Newcastle and is only a 6-10 minute walk away from the main campus, so luckily it’s not bad at all. The only thing I don't like is that although there are so many bus lines in Newcastle, especially in the city centre, I cannot use a single one to get around campus a little faster. None of them connect the parts of the city I need to get to, so it's always faster to just walk.

 

To give you an overview, here's some visualisation:

Newcastle Upon Tyne City Centre Map

main campus

Business School

As already mentioned above, I have most of my classes on the main campus, and exclusively so in the 3 buildings on the north-west side in that circled area. When looking at the old castle-like buildings of the main campus area, I sometimes feel like I'm in Hogwarts :)

The Monument

China Town

On top of the Grey Monument in the city centre stands Charles Grey (the very one we know today for his Earl Grey tea). The bus I take to get to university every morning goes right by the monument. When I have to go to the main campus, I get off the bus at the monument bus station and have to walk the rest of the way. Only when I have classes in the Business School, I can wait 2 more stops, because the bus passes the Chinese arch, the Business School and the football stadium. The Chinese arch marks the beginning of China Town, which has many Chinese shops, supermarkets and restaurants.

Millenium Bridge

standing on the bridge at night

The Millenium Bridge is a bridge only for pedestrians. It can be tilted to let ships pass through, which uses about as much energy as would be required to boil water in a kettle. At night the bridge glows in beautiful changing rainbow colours.

We went to the Theatre Royal last week to watch Shakespeare's Hamlet. Our German flatmate told us that the Theatre Royal here in Newcastle offers special cheap tickets to get more young people to go to the theatre. So for people aged 16-25 they reserve 25 tickets per show which can be bought by these young people for just £5 instead of the regular price of £25. Too bad I'm 26 already, I had to pay the full price :/ But even for that price it was definitely worth it. It was played by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which seems to perform quite often in London and Newcastle.

The last point on the map I'm going to mention here is the Goose carvery. It's a restaurant near university campus which serves lunch. The special thing about it is that it is comparatively cheap and the quality of the food there is way better than anything else you can get for this price anywhere in the area. Students pay £3,77 for one type of meat of their choice (usually they offer gammon, turkey and pork) or £3,41 for battered fish or meat pie. Two slices of the chosen meat are then cut off the whole piece in front of them and additionally there is an all-you-can-eat vegetable buffet with round about 10 different veggies and potato variations to choose from. This is clearly the first surprisingly positive experience I had here so far concerning food. Other than this, most of the food here, even from supermarkets, is more expensive than it would be in German supermarkets, and this even though very often the quality is worse. But there will be more on food on my facebook page pretty soon. ;)

All this should give you a pretty good overview of 'my Newcastle', or 'toon', as geordies would pronounce 'town'. Just one more little thing for those of you who are bored enough to watch a bus ride from Byker metro to the monument. I filmed this one for fun, just to show you how bumpy such a bus ride can be over here and what it looks like when sitting in the top front of a double-decker bus, which is where I usually sit on my way to university.