Day 17: A Supervision

I'm backdating my posts (yes, I know, cheating) because it's been absolutely mad these past two weeks and Blogger still appears to think I'm in the U.S.

On Sunday night, I realized that I had virtually nothing written for my first supervision meeting on Monday. Because I am terrible at noting down these sorts of things, I couldn't remember if I'd been instructed to prepare anything beforehand. And so I frantically spent the night drafting an outline of my final project.

On a side note, there are an unsurprisingly large number of irons available for use in the laundry room at King's.
Because Cambridge.

In other words, I'm massively intimidated by my supervisor, who most closely resembles the terrifying child of Tom Hulce's Amadeus and Daniel Day-Lewis.

I felt underdressed at our orientation meeting.
I vowed never to feel so again.

This issue was not helped by the fact that, upon reaching our supervision room together, the first thing Mr. Shell-Caressing Supervisor did was remove the analog clock from the room because "it's too loud." And then we sat down and started talking.

I can say right now, after just our first session, that this is something that is seriously lacking at UCLA, by virtue of the fact that there are simply too many students and not nearly enough faculty for every student to have the opportunity to sit down, one-on-one, with a supervisor for an hour or so to debate (yes, debate!) the topic of interest. It was both mind-meltingly terrifying and exhilarating.

We thrashed out the general look of my project after some fairly spirited debate on the purpose of music.

Dear me. I'm turning into a regular old academic fart.

I then went for a quick (or so I thought) run down into the wilderness beyond Grantchester amidst ferocious wind.

Those are actual sheep, my friend.