The Bayot Goes to School

So it's back to school. Last week was "welcome week" during which we had several orientation sessions in our faculty and department. I met several Thais who are also doing my course, which is of course great. And then I spent the rest of welcome week attending talks on such things as eating healthy (I know, I need to learn a great deal on keeping a 30-inch waist), managing money (oh, this too), and finding a part-job (which should happen now).

This week I started my courses. As we are required to take three courses, I picked politics, anthropology, and history. I hope somehow I'd be able to tie the three together, especially in writing my dissertation.

In one of my courses, I met a couple of farangs who used to live in Bangkok, too. It's amazing to find all these Thailand connections all the way here in London. Of course we instantly dived into sharing our experiences from living in Bangkok.

It's still a bit early to get a good grip on what my professors and classmates would be like.

However, I feel pretty old in class. Most of my classmates have just graduated from their BAs. So being fresh from school, they really are good on "academic speak", a skill I've lost a long, long time ago. And they seem to know what exactly they want to focus on in their study, say, migration, the politics of such and such, etc., whereas, I still don't know exactly what I'm interested in. Oh, kids these days!

The past few days I've just been trying to read as many of the required readings as I could. This brings me memories of my BA. I'm a slow reader so I need a lot of time to go through the text and then I quickly make notes... all these boring bits. I just really need to pace my self so that I don't cram the day before the lectures.

Which means I've got to discipline my self in sitting down to read at least a reading a day over the course of the week... instead of watching America's Next Top Model, no?