Letter from Boston
New School Year
By MASAKO YAMADA
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新学期
ボストン大学では、新学期が近づくにつれ、新入生たちがキャンパスに姿を見せ、着々と新たな学生生活の準備を始めます。大学院4年生になる雅子さんも、単調な学生生活に飽きが来るどころか、胸が踊り、張り切って研究をしたいという気持ちになります。雅子さんはその理由を自分なりに分析してみました。
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Although the semester has not yet officially started, thousands of new
students have already arrived on campus. There are a number of orientation
sessions before classes begin. Incoming freshmen have their own orientation
activities, as do international students. The university tries to get them
settled in before others return to campus.
The arrival of these students marks the end of my summer vacation. For many
graduate students, summer vacation does not mean anything in particular.
For instance, my day-to-day schedule in the lab did not change too much
while the undergraduate students were away.
Summer vacation didn't really mean much to me and the new semester
shouldn't mean much to me, either. After all, I will still be working in the
same lab, and the new students will not affect my life too much.
However, for some reason, I feel a renewed burst of energy now. The
back-to-school atmosphere on campus and around the city of Boston is
undeniable and the excitement has rubbed off onto me. Campus tends to be
very quiet during the summer — many of the college services are cut back —
and after a couple of months, the quiet seems almost oppressive. There is
always something fresh that a new school year brings, and the new students are
the harbinger of the chaos of normal university life.
I have already been at Boston University for as long as I was at Wellesley, but I still feel enthusiastic about graduate school. I was graduated from
college after three years, and I clearly remember feeling relief at being
able to go on to the next stage of my life a year early. I'm actually
surprised that I still like being in school.
In college, I was able to take courses to my liking, engaged in a lot of
extracurricular activities, interacted with people from different fields of
study and spent my summers off campus. Even then, however, I couldn't wait
to leave. Now, I study only physics and I spend most of my time with the
same small group of people, but I haven't gotten sick of it. In fact, I can
imagine being here for another couple of years.
I sometimes wonder how this can be. The three years I've spent in
graduate school have been uniform in a certain sense, but I suppose there
have always been little goals to add excitement to the work: required
courses, home
work assignments, finals, comprehensive exams, oral exams, conferences,
collaborations.
I've never had particularly large visions with regard to the study of
physics, but I've hopped from goal to goal, and three years has gone by in
a flash. All I can say is that I'm glad I stayed on this path.
There is always something new to learn. One of the new things that I'm looking
forward to this semester is taking an elective physics course in the study
of polymers. Since most of the students taking the course are senior
graduate students, the problems in the class look as if they will be more
interesting than the drills we were forced to do in our introductory
courses.
On the other hand, the class also looks as if it will be much more relaxed,
since the course is not a requirement. I have the feeling that this kind of
relaxed yet challenging atmosphere is the most satisfying one for learning
in the classroom.
In the past year, my focus at school has gradually shifted from classroom
study to research. This is considered to be a step up. It has been a
gradual, but large, change for me. However, I am looking forward to
experiencing homework sets and finals again.
Egalitarian round-table discussions are crucial in doing good research,
but perhaps because of my many years of Japanese lecture-based learning, I
still find it very satisfying to sit in front of a blackboard and process
information that is fed to me by a knowledgeable professor. I will have to
sweep out some of the cobwebs in my brain to resume that kind of
thinking. This is the sort of variation that makes every semester interesting.
Shukan ST: Sept. 10, 1999
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