Wait... this is summer school?!

There is one aspect of life at Cambridge to which I have not given much attention. That is, the work. Certainly, in comparison to the work required at Davidson, a few reading packets and three papers in six weeks is hardly strenuous. Amid the bustle of settling in, weekend traveling, and the ever-present delightful distraction of British accents, however, I managed to mentally shrink our assignments out of existence. It came as something of shock- to all of us, I think- when we read the fine print on our syllabi "first paper- due July 8th" and hauled out our laptops yesterday to begin. Apparently, I signed up for summer school. But if you're going to be writing papers in July, summer school at an 800-year-old European university is definitely the way to go!

Dr. Dietz, the Davidson professor who created this program and appears in Cambridge as the director every third year, created the program so that our class structure would model an actual Cambridge University student's experience. Every morning at 9, we attend lecture with a Cambridge professor- usually a specialist in some aspect of British history or literature from 1750 to 1850, which is our period of interest. We have a different lecturer every day and have so far covered topics from the British reaction to the French Revolution to the shift from classical to romantic music. In the latter, our lecturer, both a professor and a concert pianist, played snatches of Clementi and Haydn on a harpsichord in the marble entry-room of Houghton Hall, the grand manor house that belonged to England's first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole.  (Yes, I'm bragging just a bit.)

While the lecturers change daily, we have two Cambridge graduate students, Tom and Laura, who teach our tutorial groups twice a week. They assign outside readings to us, edit and grade our papers, and guide our discussions in tutorial. They also showed us around the Cambridge University Library (abbreviated the UL), hang out with us at local pubs, and are chock-full of good British wit. So, while part of our Cambridge education is historical and academic, there's certainly a popular culture component as well!