University of Glasgow blether thread

Gotta have my KLowe loving time! Gutted that Old Icelandic is only on next year, would have really enjoyed it!

YAY see I was all up for Onomastics but I really get bored by the lecturer while abroad I'm doing Pragmatics which should be fun! One of the good things about going abroad, 10 modules so get to do a lot of things, including learning the native language of Blackfoot and experimental psycholinguistics (hopefully going to use experimental psycholinguistic stuff for dissertation and use MRI machines and stuff (if I'm allowed...))

Wow, psych stuff will be fascinating! And you'll have a totally unique dissertation that case, I would think

The big thing I do regret about not going abroad is the lack of language acquisition stuff here. There's a bit of it in Socioling but not a devoted course. That would be one of my absolute definite choices, and I know some of the Canadian unis have courses just on acquisition. You're probably doing one... lucky cow :P

Unfortunately Calgary doesn't have one! While abroad I'll do: Experimental Psycholinguistics, Historical Linguistics 1, Phonetics 1, Language and Power, Introduction to Pragmatics, Native Language 1, Introduction to Semantics, Syntactic Analysis 1, Phonetics 2 and Second Language Syntax properly excited!

Yeah it's the reason I took psychology this year so that I could look at the more psychological aspect of language.

Ah that's really cool, it'll be an intense year though! You'll probably think fourth year's a breeze while we'll all be stressing our brains out... The Native Language will be great, getting to do something so specific in so much detail- well jealous Still kind of kicking myself about not applying for year abroad, but hey ho. Just got an amazing flat in the city centre though, so I have some pretty exciting things going on right here :P

Very intense. I'm already stressing about midterms and having to write more than one essay per subject each term! Apparently dissertations are nothing compared to year abroad so that's a relief at least!

Yay flats! Someone bought the flat we're in at the minute a week ago and it's really odd knowing that one of them is going to be in my room...

The workload looks insane, but it'll be such a whirlwind of amazingness you won't have time to stop and realise how intense it is... or something? :P

I'm already thinking of ideas for my dissertation- gonna do it in Politics. They're 8000 words right? Shouldn't be so bad... wrote a 4000 word essay for Advanced Higher English in a few days, that wasn't so difficult...

*cue 4th-years ripping me to shreds*

I'm not a huge fan of this fad for short dissertations these days. It's really hard to make a good job of a research project in 8,000-10,000 words. The foundations of a project often need to be spelled out at length to show the examiner you understand the background to the area, and by the time you've done that you're left with 5,000 words to cram your research into. Most subjects still have 12,000-15,000, which I think is a much more reasonable length. In some ways it's easier to make a good job of something that length.

Workloads in North American universities look bad, but they're alright really. Compared to the weekly 2500 word essay that allowed you about two days a week to do other things with three days solid reading and two days writing, I felt the mid-term paper structure was much less intense. You had to write 5,000 words twice a term for two subjects, yeah, but you could at least have a couple of weeks to understand what the hell you were doing. In a way that's a good thing: doing nothing for four weeks and then rehashing a few books into something isn't the best way to really understand what the hell you're doing. TBH my junior honours structure of three essays, three seminar papers and three presentations in a term (typically that meant nine weeks) was a good workload balance if you did it properly. Also allowed enough time to enjoy yourself and not have to work ridiculously hungover unless you had a planning nightmare.

Compared to my 12,000 word INTRODUCTION to my current work, I long for essays again, although I think I've forgotten how to say anything meaningful in under 5,000 words now. Assuming I say anything meaningful as it is.

To be honest I'm really looking forward to writing my dissertation. Geeky as that may be I find the 3,000 word essay limits really annoying (I mean for goodness sake I wrote a 5,000 word essay for A Level...) so will be nice to be able to make every point I want to make! Also having written over 50k of fiction in a month whilst writing other essays and stuff I'm sure I'll cope

Yeah I think the structure over there should be good for me, give me a bit more motivation to learn as I go and not leave everything till last minute!

Woah that is a long introduction...what's it on?

I mean, there's a skill (especially in 1st/2nd year) in showing you can get to the heart of an argument quickly, and that in part is why pre-honours students are given very short essays. It's not always about 'less work': it was reckoned that giving most first years 3500 words to play with would probably just cause them to write everything they knew about something and not answer the question. In that respect, I can see the merit of 1500 word papers.

Honours students, once they know how to structure and answer questions, should be given more freedom to show how much they know about the topic and sometimes that can't be done unless the question is very specific or the word limit is eased.

My intro is on my PhD on political economy in the British Naval arms sector between the Wars. Essentially it's a study of which businessmen knew which politicians and who scratched whose back and what that meant for the state of British defences, rectification of deficiencies and war preparations. Since I have 100,000 words to play with and at this rate I'll struggle to get to 70k, I reckon spinning out what I've got for all it's worth is no bad thing!

Wow that sounds really cool my eventual plan is to go on to do masters then phd so who knows, I could be writing a 100k thing at some point! I guess one way to get your word count up is to make sure you mention everyone's full name constantly. Always used to help me in history essays where I was struggling word count wise!

I thought it sounded really cool too...when I dreamt the idea up. These things have a way of not being quite as much fun when you've been looking at papers and researching it for years. Beats a job, I guess.

If I could give one-tip to dissertation-ers it's that in order to make your case strongly you're not actually having to re-invent the wheel. A big part of your own work is to set out what others have written, what's good and not so good about it, what we still don't know enough about, and how you can make some small contribution to that endeavour. As a result, you're probably only writing 2-3 short chapters on a small study of something, but the difference between A and B grade work is how good a job you make of it, which is often about setting your little corner of expertise in the right framework. Don't bite off too much. A new way of looking at X through a different lens or what some new sources say about it and what this says about the existing conclusions by other academics is plenty and will develop you more than thinking in 4th year you're ready to tackle the Cold War conundrum in a way no one else has managed.

Stay away from the real world as long as possible

I would quite like to reinvent the wheel though. I think it's everyone's dream to be revolutionary. Also a life long ambition is to have other people quote my work. (Sad I know...) I think I'll leave really revolutionary stuff for PHD though as currently can't think of anything revolutionary...

Yup- it's totally understandable and very tempting when you feel constrained by the question-led approach of honours essays to want to do something really, really big for the dissertation now that you have the chance, but that's almost always a recipe for disaster (or a C, at least) which will only make it much less likely that you'll be allowed to do a masters or PhD and will be able to get to a level where you can say revolutionary things one day. You can always just overplay the significance of your small finding, which is what everyone does anyway, at UG and then try to tackle the big topic when you have the time, tools, and hopefully the funding to be able to make a good job of it.