The Mysterious Affair at Sussex

I realize that most of you don't really know much of what my life here at Sussex entails. Yes, it's a student life but I think it's different from the kind of life a Finnish student would normally live. To elaborate on this, I'm going to give you a 'day in the life' -type of post today.

Monday
Mondays are usually the busiest day of the week in terms of classes. Most weeks I have 2 lectures from 11am to 1pm. The first lecture is a literature module, where we discuss a different literary text each week. Last week it was a text by Wordsworth; this week we're reading about the meaing of the author, led by Michel Foucault's text 'What is an Author'.

The second lecture is for my bigger linguistics module, which is also the most enjoyable so far. This week we are discussing lexigography, which is the 'art' of writing dictionaries. It's really quite fascinating to realize how I never really thought about how, why or by whom a dictionary I use was compiled. Dictionaries have authors too; perhaps just not in the same sense as you would think of Shakespeare as being an author. Some weeks we have another of these lectures in the evening from 5pm to 6pm.

After my lectures I come back to the flat, cook some lunch and relax. Later I usually go through my notes from the lectures and look through my calendar for any reading or other assignments that need doing during the week. I've become a major consumer of post-it notes - I like to write little to-do lists on them for the day.

This Monday I started at my new nannying job. I was a little apprehensive as the family are from a different culture and of a different faith, but the children were absolutely lovely and a joy to look after. It was really interesting to see a family flat on campus - it's small but comfy, I think ! That's another thing I hadn't thought of before - the fact that the Uni has allocated flats just for families with children. It seems obvious when you think of it, it just had never occurred to me until now.

Despite the fact that lectures and seminars only take up about 10 hours of my time each week, I'm kept busy by all the reading and assignments. There's also so much to do in terms of Uni societies and other social events - there's really no time to be bored ! 

Love, M