Just
when I thought the end was far from near, we finished our second semester of
classes. At some points I really felt this day would never come. It has not
been easy to get this far. In all honestly, I’m tired of school (after having
been enrolled pretty much straight through the last 25 years, minus a few
instances when I was off gallivanting). 25 years is a really long time!
Now
that the course work is finished, I am left with a 5 exams which will take up
most of May, and then I’m off to Burkina Faso for a while to complete my thesis
research. July will be a whirlwind of rapid writing combined with many
wonderings (I’m sure) of if I will complete it. But by July 31st,
I’m handing in my dissertation! August - I will have some Canadian visitors
coming to check out the two computer labs that they have contributed to. I’ll
also have to sit by the pool or the ocean a lot because there’s no way I can
come back to Canada and receive questions like “weren’t you just in Africa for
the last year? Why are you so pale?”
After
8 months of class work I thought I’d take a minute to share some of the
differences between school in Canada and in Ghana.
In
terms of quality of education, I think things are pretty much the same. All of
our lecturers have studied abroad, a few even in Canada (and one even lived
just down the street from me in Ottawa, I recently found out). Although I don’t
know what a Master’s program is like in Canada, I think the material I’ve
learned here is similar to what the same course would have given me in Canada.
One
of the major differences is the quantity of work to be done. If I’m completely
honest, the first semester I did about 5 of the assigned readings throughout
the semester and crammed in a lot of hours reading prior to exams. I don’t
think I could have done the same in my undergrad, let alone a Masters. That
brings me to my next point, about exams – in my undergrad classes would have
ended and 2 or 3 days later exams started. Here we’ve been given a week or more
which has been really great, considering my lack of reading.
The
lecturers I have met have had amazing careers all over the world. Some have
multiple PhD’s, many have taught at some of the world’s leading universities,
and have worked in a diverse range of settings. I think the lecturers are the
most impressive part about LECIAD…and I hope that the department maintains
this! I also think they care more about
their students. It is much easier to make personal relationships with lecturers
and they are happy to meet you anywhere to help you or to give you advice on an
upcoming paper or exam. In one of our
last classes, where we had all been divided into groups for group
presentations, the last group and the lecturer had some kind of
miscommunication which resulted in the final group not being prepared to
present. The lecturer explained that the group should have e-mailed him or
called him to get the information they needed. He remarked that in a previous
group a student had called him at home when he was just sitting down to eat
with his children. At first I thought he was going to tell the group that they
should have found an appropriate time to call him, unlike that student, but
instead he told the group that that was exactly what they should have done. I
don’t think I met any lecturers in Canada who would have suggested that. In
fact, most of them say e-mail them but don’t call them even though their
numbers are on the syllabus (and even
then its just office number, never cell phone!)
This
all being said, this year has been EXCEPTIONALLY HARD. I was never a stressed
student in my undergrad, but I have found myself stressed out on a number of
occasions here. I have thought to myself, I’m doing less work than I did in
Ottawa and I feel like burning my books and crying. Why? Its because the
system, or the environment, here is EXTREMELY difficult. For example, as I
write this my battery is at 32% on my laptop and I can’t charge it because we
haven’t had power for the last 10 hours. This also means that the pump that
pumps water to the taps is off, so there’s no running water. And the ice that
accumulated in the freezer part of my fridge has all melted and is now on the
floor outside the fridge. Another challenge is getting materials to read. One
of the reasons I read very little for my courses is that there are no assigned
textbooks to buy from the bookstore, but suggested readings. The problem with
that, while cost saving, is that many of the suggested readings are in books
that can’t be found or on online sites which we don’t have access to. The
internet is off and on, mostly off. I can’t tell you how many journal articles
I have had to read using the 3G network on my iphone. I’m sure my eyesight is
4x worse from reading the tiny text.
Its
also hot. And for me hot means sleepiness. We don’t have A/C in our classroom
so sitting there from 8am-6pm is hot…and exhausting. If I had class all day in
Canada, which I never had in the first place, I could have come home and read a
bit after class. Because I’ve been hot for the whole day I come home, eat, and
sleep.
Speaking
of lights off, yesterday I cooked stew for my rice that should last me about a
week. Unfortunately I got up from the bed this morning to heat it and as I
walked to the fridge the light went off. The queue at the Night Market (a place
where they sell food to students on campus) was probably an hour long, so I
felt forced to go and sit in a restaurant instead. When I’m supposed to be learning… Life is
hard, so school is hard.
This
all being said, the year has been a great learning experience for me. It has
helped me put ‘hard work’ in Canada into a new perspective. I have built new
friendships and built patience. In fact, the lights off hardly bothers me
anymore. I gave a speech in Japanese earlier this year about why its important
to study abroad. One of my lines was
something like this:
Gaikoku de benkyooshimasu kara
takusan challenge ga arimasu; Demo
challenge kara atarashii chishiki ya gijutsu o mi ni tsukemasu
Basically, studying
abroad brings a lot of challenges but we learn a lot from these challenges.
In sum, if you ever
have a chance to study abroad or you know someone who could - do it! Or make
them do it! You (or they) will never regret it.
n.b.: this blog is just a generalization of experiences and does not run true for all lecturers that I’ve met in Canada or in Ghana, and I’m sure there are major differences between programs, universities, etc. In fact, I know that one of my friends in a different course here has had a very different experience here.
