Fall 2019 Academic Update

I hope everyone has a good Thanksgiving and is enjoying their well-deserved break!

Not much happened this week, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about how school is going and reflect (this is also prompted by Aboni still not knowing what I’m doing here even though I’ve definitely talked about it before). This weekend (well actually starting this Thursday aka Thanksgiving) I’m going to visit Kristiana in London! I’m very excited for that so look forward to the lowdown next Wednesday.

I’m taking 4 classes here, two at the Smith Center and two at Paris 7 Diderot. I’ll just go through each of them with my thoughts and opinions.

Langue Avancée 2

This is an upper level grammar/text focused French class at the Smith center. At Smith, I’d stopped taking classes focused on grammar, so this was a necessary side step to evaluate quality of writing and text structure. Our class time usually is made up of us going through exercises, composition corrections, and short text structures. We read different texts and use them as subject/style inspiration for compositions. The compositions are interesting but honestly they kill me. I’ve thankfully been doing pretty well relatively with them, but writing them is painful. For some of them, I get Jean to go over the grammar with me, which is noticeable in the grade haha. He’s a literary researcher so he knows what sounds good. So far I’ve written papers on the history of glitter, Marie Laveau, girl scouts vs boy scouts, the switch from pale to tan skin in popularity, and the switch from clowns being seen as positive to negative. The class can be a pain, but I do see my writing getting more interesting and I like learning nuances and certain grammatical structures.

Sciences à Paris Seminar

In this year-long seminar, we work on finding internships for spring semester and also talk about other random science-related things like communication of science and its perception in society. We visited a science and technology museum and the lab of our teacher. One class we spent discussing societal conception of climate change. We all read different related books and I chose the Sixth Extinction (I think that’s its title….I only found it in French so La Sixième Extinction). It was one of the first books to discuss explicitly the anthropocene or time on earth defined by humans. I also like the class because every time we start with a different pastry and discuss some historical or scientific history behind it.

Biologie Intégrative Animale et Végétale

This class has been frustrating at times but also not that bad in total. It’s a combo of physiology and cell biology pretty much. The content is fine but the frustrating part can be the administration. Here’s what the structure has been: lecture once a week, small groups 5 times the semester, lab twice the semester. This is a big jump from the expected class time at Smith clearly, but I’m not complaining. For the lecture, we found out when it happened that for this class, lectures are only half the semester. Now, the lectures at that time and place are for a different, related course on cell bio. For the small groups, it was irritating because we found out on the fourth session that there was a change of dates at some point and we (me and the other American students pretty much) had missed one. Since there are only 5, it’s not that good, but I think it’ll be ok. I had the first lab session last Friday, and it was… interesting. It was supposed to be 8:30am-12:30pm, BUT it ended up going until 3:30. I guess it’s somewhat acceptable since there are only 2 sessions, but I was tired after. The lab was different in ways like we had to buy our own lab coat. I had to do procedures I’d never done before but it was overall not terrible. Even my lab partner said the teacher was talking fast and he (my partner) seemed competent but was at some points confused on what the teacher was explaining. So it’s not just me! The whole grading for this class is confusing but we’ll see what happens. It’s nice because Smith sets up tutoring for us for university courses so every week we meet with a tutor and review the concepts.

Neuropsychologie

This class will translate to only 2 two credits so it’s very low key, once a week one hour. The concepts are honestly nothing extremely new out of all the neuro classes I’ve done before. I do like the arrangement though. Like the past few weeks have been focused on one clinical category each like apraxies, akinesia, aphasias, etc.The slides are always posted promptly and have pretty much everything the professor says which I’m not sure is good or annoying. In the short term good because I don’t miss anything but also it makes me wonder what the poing of having a lecture is. But I guess you could say that for a lot of things in college. Also, I’m not sure what to expect for the exam… but I think it said it would be multiple choice ??

The biology and neuropsychology classes will have exams after Christmas break, so hopefully they go wellllll. Overall I’m happy with the classes I’m taking, but also I look forward to next semester. I really need to work on finding an internship though….

With the science classes, I’m not sure if it’s worth the pain to pursue here. The material is nothing super new to me, and the perspective is pretty close to that of America. What I’m saying is I might be subjecting myself to unnecessary difficulties (language, administration). What’s more, so much of the science world functions in English… it’s a good exercise to learn things in French but also in terms of my academic progression, I’m happy to have tried but am not sure if I need continue.

This being said, next semester, I plan to take classes at the smith center and at Paris 4 which is the Sorbonne. They focus solely on humanities, but I was wanting to take classes like art history or cinema or mythology. I’ve heard the Sorbonne is more demanding but I think it could be fun. We’ll see if I come to regret that decision!

Anyways, now you can’t say I don’t talk about how school is going Aboni!