I’m now midway through my time in York as an English trainee, and I have actually been taking pleasure in every minute of it. Here’s some things I want I ‘d understood about the course prior to starting uni:
You discover that there is a whole wide world of literatures (Yes, with the plural’s’!).
One fantastic thing about the York English Lit structure is that it exposes students to English Literature throughout time periods and throughout continents, and permits you to find writers you’ve never heard of previously. In your first year, you’ll start with a module that consists of texts from the 15th century all the way to the contemporary. In readings, lectures and seminars, discussion of these texts likewise always involves conversations of the significant historical events of that period, how life resembled in that age, and obviously, essential philosophical and cultural readings of the text (something which I have actually grown to actually delight in reading).
In another module, York’s English program exposes us to worldwide literatures, centred around themes such as post-colonialism (the Literature of nations who were ex-British nests, for instance). Personally, I discovered that to be an exceptionally enhancing experience that widened my worldview and triggered me to think about the relationship between Literature and Politics, and to question the purpose of a literary text.
This might sound a little difficult, but it truly isn’t so! You absolutely can anticipate to discover studying English at uni to be greatly various from the method we did it at A Levels, and while I did feel rather stressed in the first few weeks of term, I ultimately discovered my footing and grew to love the volume and speed of work we have at uni. It gives you a huge sense of accomplishment when you look back at the end of the term at all the poems, plays and books you have actually gone through in simply 10 weeks!
The wide direct exposure to several durations of literature makes you find interests in topics you never ever engaged with before. For me, post-colonialism was my newfound love.
Versatility, flexibility, versatility!
Something I didn’t anticipate was just how much flexibility the English department offers us. Studying English at York is thrilling since the course provides you a great deal of self-reliance to direct your research studies. The English course has fairly couple of contact hours (a.k.a. time invested in lectures and workshops) as compared to other subjects. This suggests that a lot of time invested at university is committed to independent studying and taking the initiative to discover tutors in their office hours to engage them in discussions about a text/idea that you’re really enthusiastic about. The coolest aspect of the English course would be that you get to choose exactly what you want to compose you essay on– there are no set concerns (save for the composed tests in summer season term)! This suggests that from each module, you get to pick the texts that you were most interested in to write your essay on, and you get to choose what important readings you wish to check out for your essay, and how you wish to structure your essay.
Having more versatility with your schedule also suggests that you can use the time to join more societies or even use up a term-time internship, which was exactly what I did! Through the York Careers Website, I looked for a term-time internship lasting for 12 weeks in Communications, and spent roughly 12 hours a week at the internship, which relates to about three days a week. This helped me acquire work experience and employability skills, and also some additional income on the side.
We have movie screenings.
We enjoy film adjustments of a few of the texts in our reading lists (side note: I love how these sessions appear on our timetable as legit compulsory lectures to participate in)! Who ‘d have believed that studying English at uni also consists of being in a dark lecture theatre and seeing a motion picture predicted on to the substantial screen? Consider it as a Netflix motion picture date … however with an entire bunch of people.
In my first year, I keep in mind enjoying A Midsummer’s Night Dream and loving how the motion picture represented the characters of the play a lot that I wrote one of my essays on the play! And simply last term, seeing Samuel Beckett’s Endgame throughout a film screening made me see the play in an entire different light, prompting me to obtain three different books from the library about Beckett and his works.
They’re not going to let you be confused and worried all on your own.
We’re assigned an individual manager at the start of university, and this supervisor will be a scholastic from your department– in our case, English– and you ‘d satisfy him/her regularly throughout your 3 years of research study to just talk about how you’re discovering the course and how you’re feeling, if you’re coping well or if you’re having a dilemma about module choices, and so on.
