9/27/2005 01:50:00 PM|||James O'Malley|||

Earlier this morning I went down to the Humanities building to get an introduction to the course I'll be starting next week.

It turns out the workload is slightly more than I expected... four lectures and four seminars a week. This should make the commute in that I'll be inevitably be taking when I decide I can't cope with living here, slightly more justified.

After being given a talk on the course, who we can talk to if we need help, and so on, we were split into pairs to work on a couple of "brainstorming" questions. The first one was "What is politics?". The person I was working with and myself came up with several "keywords" about the subject, but it was all slightly worrying that I can't define the subject that I'll be learning about for the next three years.

After this, the class (can I call it that at my age?) of ten were split into two groups of five. We were given a situation, and we had to make political decisions about how to deal with it. My group's scenario was "It's the BSE crisis, the government have setup the food standards agency, Blair's going to open it, but oh no! The night before there's a salmonella outbreak there!"- the question was how to handle it?

The most amusing part of discussing it was when someone suggested that the PM "blame the French", and we all sort of jokingly agreed that it'd distract the media by getting the xenophobes mad. Then the girl with the obvious French accent decided to contribute something to the discussion.

The course itself though looks like it's going to be pretty good- I just can't see myself actually living here for much longer.

|||112782660457608913|||Introduction to the course