Today was our first-ish day of class. We had a meeting scheduled at 10 with our professors and classmates, and Liz and I were excited to meet all the people we would be suffering with over the next year. After about twenty minutes we were surrounded by 35 Asians, 2 Greeks, one girl from Scotland, and one girl from Norway. I started having flashbacks to Davis, California, where the Asians had also taken over, and it made me yearn for some sunshine, which unfortunately won't be available to those of us in the UK for another 6 months or so. Anyway soon after all the students had trickled in, our professors walked in, and I was glad to find that I wasn't intimidated at all (yet).
Jacquie introduced herself as the department head in a cool British/French accent, and her untamed, crazy curly hair and dress clothes that she had paired with tennis shoes indicated to me that she was the most intense form of academic. You know the type - only has 5 outfits and wears them on the same day of every week, doesn't really fix their hair or wear makeup, and they are always INSANELY brilliant. But Jacquie seemed pretty relatable so I couldn't complain.
Next up was Derek, a mid-50's Scottish man with a PhD in Biochemistry (or some other ridiculously hard science degree), and I'm sure the question on everyone's mind was the same - "What the hell are you doing teaching PR?". Unfortunately he never addressed that question and all of us were too scared to bring it up, since Derek seemed like the type that wouldn't find that amusing. I couldn't exactly put my finger on it, but for some reason Derek reminded me of Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace - old and grumpy, but with a big ol' heart hiding in there somewhere! We'll see how accurate that impression is soon enough...
Our last professor was Julia, a younger, soft-spoken and very chill hippie type with long brown hair. We were informed that Julia was in charge of a related program called Public Communications Management and that we wouldn't see much of her, so I didn't really bother trying to figure her out and moved my attention to our program syllabus, which was about 50 pages long. And the intimidation began.
First off, our University's grading system is unlike anything I've ever seen. There's stars and smiley faces and half-moons and like 24 possible grades (ok there's no smiley faces or half-moons, but there really are stars!). Derek asked the class, "What would you all think if you got a grade of 80%?" and after about 30 seconds it was apparent that no one else was gonna answer, so Liz said, "I'd be really happy!" and I said, "I'd be upset, I can do better than that." To which Derek replied, "Well, get used to it, because we don't hand out grades better than that. You will never get an A." Ok....what was I supposed to say to that? Intimidation continues.
After half-explaining the alien grading scale to us, they moved on to the section on plagairism. It all seemed pretty standard, stuff about referencing styles and how to not jack other people's ideas without saying that it isn't your own, blah blah blah. Then Derek said that they had plagairism-detecting software that they were going to run every one of our assignments through, and that if we failed to properly reference on two seperate occasions (I'm talkin little stuff, like not including page numbers!), we were going to fail the program. Considering that there were people in our class who had never even written a bibliography, it all seemed pretty harsh.
So after they finished going through the syllabus and scaring the shit out of everyone there (especially the Asians, I'm not even sure that they all understood what was going on), we all had little sandwiches and sparkling water (how posh, I know) and chit chatted with each other. We met another American, from North Carolina of all places. How small is the world? He said his name was Andrew Breedlove, and I informed him that I would now be calling him Breedlove so I hoped he was ok with that. He looked like he minded, but I didn't care (I bet he secretly likes it anyway). There was a supermodel-looking chick from Norway who had a funny accent and an even funnier name - Marte Semb Aasmundsen, yea you read that right. I wish I could attach a sound-clip of me doing my impression of her, it's pretty spot on. And about 30 other people that I couldn't specifically remember after one meeting.
After all the sandwiches were gone Liz and I decided to head home, where we made dinner and went over our schedule to figure out what times we had classes, and to see exactly how much trouble we had gotten ourselves into with this whole Master's thing. We started tooling around on the university's website to have a look at our professors and their backgrounds, when I realized just how deep in the shit we had actually waded. To see just how wrong I was about Jacquie not being intimidating, please follow this link http://www.fmj.stir.ac.uk/staff/jacquie-letang/jacquie-letang.php. You will see how long she has been a leader in the field of PR and the CRAZY amount of stuff she has published on the subject (and also a picture of her). And the intimidation had reached its peak....this lady is no joke. Relatable or not, she IS obviously freakin brilliant, and that's always a little bit scary.
Stay tuned.
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