Hello again peeps!
At last it is the final week of teaching at the university and I am looking forward to a very well deserved break. Christmas break in the UK is quite different than it is back home in Jordan, as it goes on for a full 3 weeks! Now for a UK student, that is a good time to take a train back home and spend it with their family. For an international student like myself it is quite different. Like my collegue Seif mentioned in his blog a couple of days back, we have a choice of flying back home, staying here to study (which is the most boring option), or take a week or so to tour Europe. I’ve never done the latter, but since this is my final year studying here, I am planning on visitng France in reading week.
To be honest with you guys, today’s blog will just be a silly update on my life currently, and my plans for the break. As I do every year, I am flying back to Jordan for the next 3 weeks. As I’ve told you guys before, my course is mainly assessed with coursework, I do not have exams like everyone else. So when everyone has to come back from the break early to catch up on their studies before exam week, I get to have an extra week of doing coursework that I can still do abroad. This is a major perk of doing my Digital Media Arts.
Let me break down how holidays work here: unlike the American system most universities in the Middle East follow, there is no long break between each semester. The two main breaks are actually Christmas in December and Easter in April, and both fall in the middle of each semester. We get a reading week between the last exam of the first semester and the first day of teaching of the second semester and that is usually in the beginning of February. That adds up to a good amount of days off throughout the year.
In the past week I have done lots of interesting things, including filming for a group project in the Gree Screen lab, celerating a friend’s birthday, and hosting my first ever radion show on the student radio here at the university. Did I mention that it has been really cold?
The project I am working on is for a collaboration class between my department and other courses like Dance and Theatre. My group and I are filming an interactive video about the concept of memories in dreaming. This is where the green screen comes in, we want to make it look very imaginary and trippy bu using bizaar backgrounds. This project is very exciting in particular because it is the first time we got to collaborate with people from different courses.
As for the student radio bit, a friend and I have been members of our on campus student radio station Stag Radio since the beginning of the yera. I had been a guest on a news show in the beginning of the semester, but I wanted to try and host my own show just to get that experience and to cross “host a radio show” off my bucket list. We hosted a show about our favorite pop culture things from 2017, and it was a blast! Ironically, we called it ‘The Pop-Up Show’ because we were talking about pop culture. We covered things such as new music albums, TV shows and movies, and musical theatre shows. You can listen to the radio station at their website stagradio.com
And that was a quick recap of my week! I might or might not be off the grid for the next 3 weeks while I’m back home. I will make sure to blog if anything interesting happens. I wish you all a lovely Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Seema
