Well, I finished enrolling this morning, and so I’m now officially a Third Year. Or to put it more scarily, a Final Year student – eeek!
Freshers’ Week is a strange time of year. It brings back many memories of first arriving in Cardiff as a Fresher, which feels such a long, long time ago now. It was particularly strange going to Senghennydd Court last week to show people the way to the internationals events, when that was how I first met people from the Christian Union back when I first arrived. There’s such a strange sense of deja vu at this time of year, a sense of a past that feels at the same time both yesterday and a lifetime ago.
Anyway, here’s what I’ll be doing this year in the English half of my course:
- Creative Writing III – Starting a Novel
- Creative Writing IV – Developing a Novel
- Dissertation – I want to do this on some aspect of Christianity and literary theory, but I haven’t worked out exactly what yet.
And on the history side of things:
- Nationalism and Socialism in the Chinese Revolution
- Chinese for Historians
So that should be quite interesting and challenging! I’m not quite sure what I’m letting myself in for.
I also went to the Societies Fair today. It was chaotic: loads of societies and loads of freshers in a Great Hall that isn’t great enough to contain the sheer volume of people pressing through there. In the middle of the day there was a long queue to get in. I was supposed to be on the Navigators stall at three, and had an embarrasing tussle with over-zealous security guards when I tried to sneak in quickly past the queue. You’d think the Union could be organised enough to arrange for each society to have a couple of passes each to easily allow for those manning stalls to get in and out, but unfortunately not. The whole thing really needs a bigger venue and better organisation – the room gets extremely hot, overcrowded and would be downright dangerous if there ever was an emergency. I hope it won’t quite be so mad in the Sports fair tomorrow when I’ll be on the Gair Rhydd stand in the morning…