For some time, I have suspected that even though Cornell put me on their alternate list, I was possibly pretty high on that list.
When I declined to visit the campus, not for an interview but a tour, I was hounded by THREE different administrators who tried to get me to change my mind. But travel to Ithaca, New York in February? Hell no. The weather (although that was a general guess on my part, in hindsight it was a great call), the cost, the time away from classes--the cost to me seemed to be greater than the return. It was a tour of buildings and meetings with administrators, not an interview. I already knew I was an alternate. I didn't feel the need to visit the campus.
But when Cornell didn't let the matter drop, I began to wonder if there was a subtext that I had not originally noticed. As a compromise, they gathered the three most relevant people in the vet school (Asst Dean of Students , the woman in charge of curriculum, and the woman in charge of financial aid) to deliver a video conference to me. It lasted just over three hours. That's a pretty substantial time commitment on their part for a lowly alternate.
On top of that, they were burying me in emails and snail mails stuffed with instructions to fill out forms for financial aid RIGHT NOW. Since I had to fill out the FAFSA to be able to receive financial aid from any school, not just Cornell, I went ahead and did all that back in January, which is why my taxes were done so early.
In short, they seemed to be pursuing me rather more aggressively than my position as an alternate would suggest.
So it was with no surprise that I got a call from the woman in charge of the Cornell vet school admissions office yesterday. Actually, she called three times and emailed once. I missed all the calls because I was in class (and I'm not sure she knows where I am physically; the time difference contributes to missing calls if you don't plan for it). I called her back and she said, Cornell wants to make you an offer of admission. I said, okay, send it on, but you should know that I have accepted one offer and my decision regarding Cornell will probably hinge entirely on financial matters. She said, okay, that's reasonable. We want to send you the offer letter because we want you to come here.
The offer of admission from Cornell arrived yesterday within half an hour of my speaking to her, and my financial aid offer letter from them arrived this morning.
No surprises there either. Cornell vet school has a large endowment and is able to provide more non-loan money to its students than Oregon State. The annual non-resident tuition at Cornell ($48,100) is $5,300 more per year than at Oregon State ($42,768). Unfortunately, that difference was not covered by the non-loan money that Cornell would offer me. Plus, like Oregon State, at Cornell I would remain a non-resident for all four years.
(The matter of residency varies from state to state and also depends on whether the school is private, like Cornell, or state-funded. In Oregon, I would have to quit school for 12 months in order to become a resident. No exceptions.)
And why this flurry of letters and phone calls? After receiving the offer of admission from Cornell, I have about 36 hours to make my decision. Yep, that's right. No pondering or waiting for another offer. This will be binary: yes or no, and it will be done by Friday morning.
I'm flattered that Cornell has made me this offer but in all truth I will probably turn it down. Yes, they are an excellent school. Yes, I might have access to additional financial aid resources in subsequent years, but that's of course not guaranteed.
I don't want to drag this post on much longer, but there are other reasons that staying at Oregon State might be the better choice. I'll elaborate on these in another post.hbfg
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Gainfully Employed
Tomorrow is the day. April 15. No, not tax day. I did my taxes back in January and I don't care about the anxiety that you procrastinators might have on the subject. April 15 is the official deadline for informing vet schools about your admission decision. If you got an offer from a vet school, you have to accept or decline it by April 15.
I accepted the offer from Oregon State, of course. I still can't say that I won't change my mind if another school dangles an offer in front of me, but I'm becoming more emotionally and mentally used to the idea of staying here.
As I had already worked out, if I am going to leave, I need to be out of here by the end of June. And if I stay, I need to get a job for the summer.
That's right. I need to become a gainfully employed, tax-paying citizen, at least until September. Since I landed here two years ago, I've been living off savings and the bit of money the uni tosses my way. They pay my tuition, for which I am extremely grateful. But the rest, well, I couldn't live on it as my sole source of income.
Living off savings is stressful. No money in, money only goes out. If I'm not thinking about cheese, I'm thinking about money.
Back to this job thing. I decided to start with my personal network, in fact, with one person in particular: the PI of the pregnant cow study. I worked my butt off for her project, going in night after night, showing up during the day when I was called in, and doing a good job on my assigned tasks. The project would not have failed in my absence but I am sure that I made a significant contribution to its success, and I'm proud of that. I did it for the experience, of course, but also for the potential for future opportunities. Or to put it another way, virtue is its own reward but money never hurts.
Turns out the PI of the project has a husband who is also a vet. He owns a clinic in the area. So I bided my time, let the last cow have her calf, waited for preliminary results to roll in, waited for spring break to come and go, then I approached her. (Oh yes, I started planning this months ago.) So, would S, her husband, happen to have any openings in his clinic this summer? I told her I wasn't necessarily expecting to advance my career as a clinician but that I wanted a summer job in the animal care industry if I could get one.
Well, turns out the PI gave me one hell of a recommendation to her husband. At his request, I dropped my CV off at his clinic yesterday. Today, his clinic manager called me. They want to try me out for one night a week, starting next week, with the intent to expand to nearly full time after classes are over in June. I will probably write more in the future about what the job entails, but I am thrilled that it appears to be a position with a lot of client and animal contact, not just a job mopping out boarding kennels. I would have taken the latter job without hesitation, but I'm glad that I might be able to do more.
No, of course I don't have time to start this job now when I'm buried in coursework this term, and defending the thesis on top of that. But I can't afford to pass it up, either.
The school gig is certainly a nice way to pass a few months, even a year or two, if you have the time. And I'm staring down a long, four-year tunnel of more studying. But I will be happy to have a job again, even for a few months.
I accepted the offer from Oregon State, of course. I still can't say that I won't change my mind if another school dangles an offer in front of me, but I'm becoming more emotionally and mentally used to the idea of staying here.
As I had already worked out, if I am going to leave, I need to be out of here by the end of June. And if I stay, I need to get a job for the summer.
That's right. I need to become a gainfully employed, tax-paying citizen, at least until September. Since I landed here two years ago, I've been living off savings and the bit of money the uni tosses my way. They pay my tuition, for which I am extremely grateful. But the rest, well, I couldn't live on it as my sole source of income.
Living off savings is stressful. No money in, money only goes out. If I'm not thinking about cheese, I'm thinking about money.
Back to this job thing. I decided to start with my personal network, in fact, with one person in particular: the PI of the pregnant cow study. I worked my butt off for her project, going in night after night, showing up during the day when I was called in, and doing a good job on my assigned tasks. The project would not have failed in my absence but I am sure that I made a significant contribution to its success, and I'm proud of that. I did it for the experience, of course, but also for the potential for future opportunities. Or to put it another way, virtue is its own reward but money never hurts.
Turns out the PI of the project has a husband who is also a vet. He owns a clinic in the area. So I bided my time, let the last cow have her calf, waited for preliminary results to roll in, waited for spring break to come and go, then I approached her. (Oh yes, I started planning this months ago.) So, would S, her husband, happen to have any openings in his clinic this summer? I told her I wasn't necessarily expecting to advance my career as a clinician but that I wanted a summer job in the animal care industry if I could get one.
Well, turns out the PI gave me one hell of a recommendation to her husband. At his request, I dropped my CV off at his clinic yesterday. Today, his clinic manager called me. They want to try me out for one night a week, starting next week, with the intent to expand to nearly full time after classes are over in June. I will probably write more in the future about what the job entails, but I am thrilled that it appears to be a position with a lot of client and animal contact, not just a job mopping out boarding kennels. I would have taken the latter job without hesitation, but I'm glad that I might be able to do more.
No, of course I don't have time to start this job now when I'm buried in coursework this term, and defending the thesis on top of that. But I can't afford to pass it up, either.
The school gig is certainly a nice way to pass a few months, even a year or two, if you have the time. And I'm staring down a long, four-year tunnel of more studying. But I will be happy to have a job again, even for a few months.
I Miss Cheese
So before I launch into my rant, I just have to note that my blog readership appears to have increased by 50% in the past week. All the new readers appear to be in Russia? I can't be bothered to run a real analysis on user stats, so who knows what this means.
But back to the rant. I miss cheese. I really, really miss it.
I am on a diet. My goal, well, I have a goal but that's not the important point. My diet, the means by which I hope to achieve that goal, is simply calorie counting. That means I examine food labels, look up things at the USDA nutritional website, and measure out every single thing that I eat.
This is not a diet that requires the excessive consumption or avoidance of any particular food. I've got a set target for the total calories I want to consume each day and I negotiate with myself how that divides up (actually, I have a spreadsheet but it's the same thing). I start with the ideal of "everything in moderation" then balance that against my daily calorie cap. Even with that optimistic start, some foods simply have to go.
The first group of rejects included pasta and rice and bread. I am not going carb-free so sometimes I eat brown rice, and I quite like potatoes because they offer additional nutrients beyond starch depending on how they are prepared. But those other things, they were far too empty of significant nutrition.
Sadly, the next to go was olive oil and cheese.
The olive oil was easy. I now cook food instead with water, fruits, and a lot of spices. It's poaching instead of frying.
The real problem was cheese. For example, a rich, aged British cheddar can have atrociously high calorie counts, as many as 400 kilocalories per 28 grams. Using around 25% of your day's allotted calories on a piddling 28g of cheese is not workable. So cheese has gone. I can't even have it in the house because I eat it all up. This makes me sad.
A small consolation is yogurt. I don't eat any of those nasty fat-free products. None of that dry "Greek" junk either. I eat full-fat, natural yogurt so it has the satisfying mouth-feel of saturated fats without the horrible calorie inflation of cheese. When I need a snack, I choose yogurt first. Still, it's not the same.
I miss cheese.
But back to the rant. I miss cheese. I really, really miss it.
I am on a diet. My goal, well, I have a goal but that's not the important point. My diet, the means by which I hope to achieve that goal, is simply calorie counting. That means I examine food labels, look up things at the USDA nutritional website, and measure out every single thing that I eat.
This is not a diet that requires the excessive consumption or avoidance of any particular food. I've got a set target for the total calories I want to consume each day and I negotiate with myself how that divides up (actually, I have a spreadsheet but it's the same thing). I start with the ideal of "everything in moderation" then balance that against my daily calorie cap. Even with that optimistic start, some foods simply have to go.
The first group of rejects included pasta and rice and bread. I am not going carb-free so sometimes I eat brown rice, and I quite like potatoes because they offer additional nutrients beyond starch depending on how they are prepared. But those other things, they were far too empty of significant nutrition.
Sadly, the next to go was olive oil and cheese.
The olive oil was easy. I now cook food instead with water, fruits, and a lot of spices. It's poaching instead of frying.
The real problem was cheese. For example, a rich, aged British cheddar can have atrociously high calorie counts, as many as 400 kilocalories per 28 grams. Using around 25% of your day's allotted calories on a piddling 28g of cheese is not workable. So cheese has gone. I can't even have it in the house because I eat it all up. This makes me sad.
A small consolation is yogurt. I don't eat any of those nasty fat-free products. None of that dry "Greek" junk either. I eat full-fat, natural yogurt so it has the satisfying mouth-feel of saturated fats without the horrible calorie inflation of cheese. When I need a snack, I choose yogurt first. Still, it's not the same.
I miss cheese.
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
Busted
I was weeding the front flowerbeds on Sunday morning when the neighbor from across the street came over and pointed out a little floofy dog trotting down the sidewalk. We live on a cul-de-sac but the dog was moving along the larger street that has a decent amount of car traffic on it throughout the day. He asked me if I knew where it belonged. He was right: it was clearly an escapee, recently groomed and not yet too wet or muddy despite it being a damp morning. I said it looked like the floofy dog from the house at the end of the park, a long narrow affair with a bike path that parallels a small creek located behind my neighbor's house. He said, well, it has a collar and a tag but it won't let me get close enough to see if there is a number.
So I put down my tools, took off my gloves, and approached the dog while saying in a very high-pitched voice, where's your mom? Why are you out walking around this morning? And other silly nonsense things. My neighbor stared at me like I was crazy, but the little dog came running right into my arms. Of course. Because a small dog that has been well cared for will certainly be used to being held and will certainly be used to silly talk in a high-pitched voice.
I picked him up and held his collar out for my neighbor to see. He called the number and sure enough, it was the people that lived in the house at the end of the park.
Sadly, I completely outed myself, but it was for a good cause.
So I put down my tools, took off my gloves, and approached the dog while saying in a very high-pitched voice, where's your mom? Why are you out walking around this morning? And other silly nonsense things. My neighbor stared at me like I was crazy, but the little dog came running right into my arms. Of course. Because a small dog that has been well cared for will certainly be used to being held and will certainly be used to silly talk in a high-pitched voice.
I picked him up and held his collar out for my neighbor to see. He called the number and sure enough, it was the people that lived in the house at the end of the park.
Sadly, I completely outed myself, but it was for a good cause.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
The Thesis
Here are the numbers:
I officially entered the graduate program a year ago. I conducted the feeding trials during May through July and spent all of August and September in the lab. I collected and read most of the references during the summer and fall. We ran all the statistical analyses in the fall. I wrote the thing during the winter break (I spent the last three weeks of December doing nothing but writing). My advisor and I have been working on the edits for most of this winter term. During the coming spring term I have to prepare a talk and a poster for the national Poultry Science Association meeting that I will attend in July (we got ambitious and submitted two abstracts), and draft at least one paper that will be submitted for publication. Along with all of this, I've had to complete over 33 credit hours of graduate coursework and that doesn't include any of my French classes.
But we are at last done with the thesis. Or rather, she is finally ready for me to release it to the rest of my committee. I told her she didn't leave much for them to do. She mumbled something about always checking things that go out under her name. She did more than check, she pulled a damned nit comb through it. We both found errors that required re-runs of some statistics, and she reined in the worst of my florid writing and arm-waving pronouncements.
In case you care, the title of my thesis is "Enzyme supplementation of broiler chicken diets containing whole flax seed as a means to increase n-3 fatty acids in human diets".
The thesis defense is scheduled for May 12, Tuesday, at 8:30am. That will give me time to make final changes to it and get all forms submitted to the Graduate School in time to meet the June graduation deadline.
Then I can add a couple more letters after my name. Not that I used the ones I already have, but it's the thought that counts.
- 223 pages, 27 pages of front matter and 196 of text
- 9 chapters
- 29 figures
- 39 tables
- 122 references
I officially entered the graduate program a year ago. I conducted the feeding trials during May through July and spent all of August and September in the lab. I collected and read most of the references during the summer and fall. We ran all the statistical analyses in the fall. I wrote the thing during the winter break (I spent the last three weeks of December doing nothing but writing). My advisor and I have been working on the edits for most of this winter term. During the coming spring term I have to prepare a talk and a poster for the national Poultry Science Association meeting that I will attend in July (we got ambitious and submitted two abstracts), and draft at least one paper that will be submitted for publication. Along with all of this, I've had to complete over 33 credit hours of graduate coursework and that doesn't include any of my French classes.
But we are at last done with the thesis. Or rather, she is finally ready for me to release it to the rest of my committee. I told her she didn't leave much for them to do. She mumbled something about always checking things that go out under her name. She did more than check, she pulled a damned nit comb through it. We both found errors that required re-runs of some statistics, and she reined in the worst of my florid writing and arm-waving pronouncements.
In case you care, the title of my thesis is "Enzyme supplementation of broiler chicken diets containing whole flax seed as a means to increase n-3 fatty acids in human diets".
The thesis defense is scheduled for May 12, Tuesday, at 8:30am. That will give me time to make final changes to it and get all forms submitted to the Graduate School in time to meet the June graduation deadline.
Then I can add a couple more letters after my name. Not that I used the ones I already have, but it's the thought that counts.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Applying to Vet School: An Update
I haven't posted on this topic in a while! Information about the process of applying to vet school is unreliable and spotty at best. It is frustrating that every applicant has to learn anew what other applicants already learned then either forgot or repressed....
The 28 US vet programs and the handful of foreign programs that are accredited by the AAVMC all agree to accept a unified application (regulated by VMCAS), to accept the same deadline for completion of that application (October of the year before you want to begin vet school), and to use the same deadline for acceptance of admission offers (April 15 of the next year). But some schools have supplemental applications. All six of the schools that I applied to had some sort of supplemental application that was either a rehash of the VMCAS material (that was frustrating) or additional questions that were relevant to that particular program or the state in which it is located (for residency decisions, etc.). Some schools interview candidates. The time at which admission offers are sent out varies widely, with some schools sending out offers in December, others waiting until late March. So there is some overall structure but the details will be quite different depending on which school(s) you apply to.
My list of six has narrowed down to five. University of Illinois invited me out for an interview/info session. But if I declined to attend one of their pre-determined dates, my application would no longer be considered. I declined.
Why would I do this? Well, an offer to attend an info session is a guarantee of absolutely nothing. Even being invited out for an interview means nothing. I would have had to miss classes (I currently have a 4.0 GPA for my graduate course work and I work quite hard for it). I would have had to pay for airfare, hotel, meals, and transportation out of my own pocket. And out of my six, Illinois was without question the last on the list.
And there was another reason. In early December, I received an email from Oregon State University (where I am now completing my MS degree) with an offer of admission to their vet school program for fall 2015. So with an offer in hand, I looked at the pseudo-offer from Illinois sitting there in the bush and made my first decision. Six became five.
Oregon is unusual in jumping out of the gate so early, but that admissions offer is for an out-of-state slot, and there is a fixed number of those. They also sent out first-round rejection letters to in-state applicants at the same time. They didn't send offers of admission to in-state applicants until early February, following a more normal time schedule for those sorts of things.
All vet schools have an alternate list for candidates that meet their criteria but for some reason just weren't enticing enough to put into the first round of admission offers. I am on the alternate list for three schools, and in ranked position one for one of them. I don't know the size of the lists or my rank on the other two; most schools are quite coy about this. But there are many good reasons for this. Sometimes there is no rank at all. Vet schools may seek to balance each incoming class between large animal and small animal, or research and clinical, or even males and females (women outnumber men by a large margin).
I still haven't heard from one school but I know that it is interviewing applicants now so I expect to know something from them soon.
I am of two minds about being put on an alternate list. I am disappointed that I did not make the cut at those three schools but I am pleased that they didn't reject me outright.
I've been talking to my network of mentors and advisors and have learned that all schools, every single one, even Cornell and UC Davis and others with that glittery panache of reputation and national ranking, dip into their alternate lists. This horse trading will begin in April and can continue up to the weeks before classes start in the fall! To get an offer from one of the schools that put me on their alternate list, someone else has to decline a prior offer of admission. Maybe several someones. There is a good probability that I will receive an offer from the school at which I'm ranked alternate one; I have no idea about the other two.
Which brings up an extremely important question: how valuable is an offer given to me in early May from school X when they didn't love me enough in January to make me an offer then?
I will of course accept Oregon's offer of admission. But this puts me in a bit of a quandary. How long do I wait to hear from the other schools? If I am going to move to some other place, I need time to find a new place to live, to pack, to move, to settle in. I'm not 21 years old, carefree and footloose, with possessions that fit in the back of my car. I passed that point decades ago.
I am drifting in unmapped territory. Most people apply to only one vet school, the one in the state in which they reside. Some of the high achievers apply to several. But "here be dragons".
I had hoped that the more information I gathered, the easier my decisions would become. Instead, I am only becoming more anxious about this process.
If you started reading this hoping for resolution, I'm sorry to disappoint. It may be weeks yet before I know what is going to happen this coming fall.
But one thing is certain. I left Saudi Arabia two years ago with a plan, a crazy plan, to get into vet school (well, to be honest, I conceived the plan almost three years before that). And somehow, I managed to pull it off. I will be going to vet school in the fall. I just don't know which one it will be!
The 28 US vet programs and the handful of foreign programs that are accredited by the AAVMC all agree to accept a unified application (regulated by VMCAS), to accept the same deadline for completion of that application (October of the year before you want to begin vet school), and to use the same deadline for acceptance of admission offers (April 15 of the next year). But some schools have supplemental applications. All six of the schools that I applied to had some sort of supplemental application that was either a rehash of the VMCAS material (that was frustrating) or additional questions that were relevant to that particular program or the state in which it is located (for residency decisions, etc.). Some schools interview candidates. The time at which admission offers are sent out varies widely, with some schools sending out offers in December, others waiting until late March. So there is some overall structure but the details will be quite different depending on which school(s) you apply to.
My list of six has narrowed down to five. University of Illinois invited me out for an interview/info session. But if I declined to attend one of their pre-determined dates, my application would no longer be considered. I declined.
Why would I do this? Well, an offer to attend an info session is a guarantee of absolutely nothing. Even being invited out for an interview means nothing. I would have had to miss classes (I currently have a 4.0 GPA for my graduate course work and I work quite hard for it). I would have had to pay for airfare, hotel, meals, and transportation out of my own pocket. And out of my six, Illinois was without question the last on the list.
And there was another reason. In early December, I received an email from Oregon State University (where I am now completing my MS degree) with an offer of admission to their vet school program for fall 2015. So with an offer in hand, I looked at the pseudo-offer from Illinois sitting there in the bush and made my first decision. Six became five.
Oregon is unusual in jumping out of the gate so early, but that admissions offer is for an out-of-state slot, and there is a fixed number of those. They also sent out first-round rejection letters to in-state applicants at the same time. They didn't send offers of admission to in-state applicants until early February, following a more normal time schedule for those sorts of things.
All vet schools have an alternate list for candidates that meet their criteria but for some reason just weren't enticing enough to put into the first round of admission offers. I am on the alternate list for three schools, and in ranked position one for one of them. I don't know the size of the lists or my rank on the other two; most schools are quite coy about this. But there are many good reasons for this. Sometimes there is no rank at all. Vet schools may seek to balance each incoming class between large animal and small animal, or research and clinical, or even males and females (women outnumber men by a large margin).
I still haven't heard from one school but I know that it is interviewing applicants now so I expect to know something from them soon.
I am of two minds about being put on an alternate list. I am disappointed that I did not make the cut at those three schools but I am pleased that they didn't reject me outright.
I've been talking to my network of mentors and advisors and have learned that all schools, every single one, even Cornell and UC Davis and others with that glittery panache of reputation and national ranking, dip into their alternate lists. This horse trading will begin in April and can continue up to the weeks before classes start in the fall! To get an offer from one of the schools that put me on their alternate list, someone else has to decline a prior offer of admission. Maybe several someones. There is a good probability that I will receive an offer from the school at which I'm ranked alternate one; I have no idea about the other two.
Which brings up an extremely important question: how valuable is an offer given to me in early May from school X when they didn't love me enough in January to make me an offer then?
I will of course accept Oregon's offer of admission. But this puts me in a bit of a quandary. How long do I wait to hear from the other schools? If I am going to move to some other place, I need time to find a new place to live, to pack, to move, to settle in. I'm not 21 years old, carefree and footloose, with possessions that fit in the back of my car. I passed that point decades ago.
I am drifting in unmapped territory. Most people apply to only one vet school, the one in the state in which they reside. Some of the high achievers apply to several. But "here be dragons".
I had hoped that the more information I gathered, the easier my decisions would become. Instead, I am only becoming more anxious about this process.
If you started reading this hoping for resolution, I'm sorry to disappoint. It may be weeks yet before I know what is going to happen this coming fall.
But one thing is certain. I left Saudi Arabia two years ago with a plan, a crazy plan, to get into vet school (well, to be honest, I conceived the plan almost three years before that). And somehow, I managed to pull it off. I will be going to vet school in the fall. I just don't know which one it will be!
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Parler En Ma Propre Voix
I've not posted much this term about French class. The third-year class has two sections offered back to back. The noon to 1pm section is a lively little group of about a dozen. I'm so glad that most of them will return next term.
Because we are required to talk to each other so much (duh, it's a language class), we know each other much better than we do other people in our other classes. Sometimes better than other students in our own home departments. And of course our grammar and vocabulary are constantly expanding. These have combined to produce two interesting results.
First, in those few minutes before class begins, as people arrive in ones and twos from their other activities, we chit chat with each other about events in the news, about our other classes, what we did during the weekend, even banalities like the weather. In French. We don't even think about what we are doing, it just seems normal.
But the second result, the one that I find kind of exciting, is that as our ability to create more sophisticated sentences is improving, we are speaking in our own voices. In other words, we aren't just parroting sentences from our grammar books. I've listened to Anne and Will and Evan talking about freshman physics in English. I know what kinds of jokes they make and how this one speaks in short sentences and this one speaks in more complex ones. And even when run through the meat grinder of French grammar rules, I can now hear those same patterns when they speak French. I know that I am doing the same thing. Our own voices, but in French.
That is very cool.
Madame McC. assigns us a variety of exercises in which we can practice different aspects of the language. We have written assignments that are often based on a particular grammatical component, such as writing about a defined topic using only the subjunctive. We have been reading short stories and we have to answer questions about them both in writing and orally. And three times each term, we have to "listen to something in French and write about it".
That last assignment seems pretty open-ended, and boy, is it ever. One girl watches interviews with Canadian hockey players and writes about a different one for each assignment. Another watches episodes of "My Little Pony" dubbed into French for each of her assignments. My friend Melodie watches full-length French movies on NetFlix and writes a synopsis of each one. Others watch news reports about current events. There is no defined limit to the length of what you can watch, and while there is no defined limit to what you write about it, most of us cough up about a page, somewhere between 300-600 words.
As for me, I dabbled a bit in a gastronomy program, and last term I watched one full-length film (Le Placard; fantastically funny). But my speciality has become short films (les courts métrages) that I find on YouTube.
My criteria are simple: less than 20 minutes long so I can watch it three or four times, no violence, no animation. I don't need subtitles although those are nice.
Because the assignment is so incredibly broad, I even chose one short film this term that had no dialogue of any kind! It was made by a French director with French actors so it technically was French. I chose to retell the story then explain what I though it meant. For the last listening assignment due this term, I decided not to discuss the story told in the film at all but to focus on the language used by the two main characters--plenty of slang, profanity, and less offensive but "common" expressions that also get the Académie's panties in a twist (for example, expressions like that last phrase right there). My appreciation for the versatility of "putain" has increased exponentially.
Short films are like short stories. It sounds easy but making/writing a good one is extremely difficult. Lots of people try and fail, utterly fail. It is important to develop the characters quickly. And it helps if the ending is a surprise. I think that I've managed to choose some particularly fine examples of the art of the court métrage:
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
Because we are required to talk to each other so much (duh, it's a language class), we know each other much better than we do other people in our other classes. Sometimes better than other students in our own home departments. And of course our grammar and vocabulary are constantly expanding. These have combined to produce two interesting results.
First, in those few minutes before class begins, as people arrive in ones and twos from their other activities, we chit chat with each other about events in the news, about our other classes, what we did during the weekend, even banalities like the weather. In French. We don't even think about what we are doing, it just seems normal.
But the second result, the one that I find kind of exciting, is that as our ability to create more sophisticated sentences is improving, we are speaking in our own voices. In other words, we aren't just parroting sentences from our grammar books. I've listened to Anne and Will and Evan talking about freshman physics in English. I know what kinds of jokes they make and how this one speaks in short sentences and this one speaks in more complex ones. And even when run through the meat grinder of French grammar rules, I can now hear those same patterns when they speak French. I know that I am doing the same thing. Our own voices, but in French.
That is very cool.
Madame McC. assigns us a variety of exercises in which we can practice different aspects of the language. We have written assignments that are often based on a particular grammatical component, such as writing about a defined topic using only the subjunctive. We have been reading short stories and we have to answer questions about them both in writing and orally. And three times each term, we have to "listen to something in French and write about it".
That last assignment seems pretty open-ended, and boy, is it ever. One girl watches interviews with Canadian hockey players and writes about a different one for each assignment. Another watches episodes of "My Little Pony" dubbed into French for each of her assignments. My friend Melodie watches full-length French movies on NetFlix and writes a synopsis of each one. Others watch news reports about current events. There is no defined limit to the length of what you can watch, and while there is no defined limit to what you write about it, most of us cough up about a page, somewhere between 300-600 words.
As for me, I dabbled a bit in a gastronomy program, and last term I watched one full-length film (Le Placard; fantastically funny). But my speciality has become short films (les courts métrages) that I find on YouTube.
My criteria are simple: less than 20 minutes long so I can watch it three or four times, no violence, no animation. I don't need subtitles although those are nice.
Because the assignment is so incredibly broad, I even chose one short film this term that had no dialogue of any kind! It was made by a French director with French actors so it technically was French. I chose to retell the story then explain what I though it meant. For the last listening assignment due this term, I decided not to discuss the story told in the film at all but to focus on the language used by the two main characters--plenty of slang, profanity, and less offensive but "common" expressions that also get the Académie's panties in a twist (for example, expressions like that last phrase right there). My appreciation for the versatility of "putain" has increased exponentially.
Short films are like short stories. It sounds easy but making/writing a good one is extremely difficult. Lots of people try and fail, utterly fail. It is important to develop the characters quickly. And it helps if the ending is a surprise. I think that I've managed to choose some particularly fine examples of the art of the court métrage:
I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)