Studying abroad in London is many things: cool, exciting, scary, and to be honest, a bit weird. For one, we speak the language... kinda. The number of times a Brit has said something to me and I've responded with an eloquent, "uhh.... what?" is pretty much uncountable... and its only been 2 weeks. I think its because they sound so pretty. I get caught up listening to them talk instead of listening to what they are saying and then I lack any response whatsoever besides the above. Hopefully I'll get over this. Then again, something's are just said so differently that it is unrecognizable. A lecturer was talking about HPV and its associations with cerv-I-cal cancer and it actually took me 15 minutes to realize what he was saying. Not to mention am-I-no acids. That one was just funny.
It is actually quite surprising how different it is from the States. Almost irritating. You can mistake it for America so easily but then the minute differences in custom and behavior slowly compile until you are confused and ask "where the hell am I???" Oh right, a foreign country. That's why its all different.
So I'm in my second week of classes. Here is a key illumination of the definition of different. The biomedical classes at Kings, of which I am taking three, are very odd and indeed different from their humanities courses entirely. The module organizer puts together a lecture series, and the classes we attend are the different lectures given by different lecturers who are all "professors" or specialists in the field. The word professor isn't used so much here. Fun fact, I learned yesterday that in the UK your GP (general practitioner.. basically your primary care family doctor) is called Dr. So-and-so, but a surgeon is called Mr. So-and-so. This is because in the Victorian times surgeons were the unqualified rando doctors whereas actual doctors had some schooling. So the guy giving you general health advice is more qualified than the guy cutting off your leg. Huzzah! Then again, times have changed, and being a surgeon is perhaps higher in the impressiveness hierarchy that is the medical professions, but they still don't rock the title doctor....off that tangent, and back to my thrilling class explanation, or module explanation, or whatever. I have one module a day and that module only once a week. We still get the same amount of teachin' time as it is a 3 to 5 hour long class. That one class just happens to have about 3 lectures in it, given by 3 different lecturers. It's kinda cool actually because, so far, all of my lecturers have been extremely passionate about their topics in a way that the professors at Lafayette never really are. And it makes sense because these are their specialties that they are talking about; they all have PhD's and Masters in these topics and know more about them then that 50 minute lecture can possibly hold. Today, for example, I had Molecular Medicine. One of my lectures was on gene therapy and cancer. This lecture was given by a doctor who has just started human clinical trials of using gene therapy techniques to potentially cure a type of leukemia; it apparently has a lot of promise, badass, no?
I guess the gist of this post is that I have come to realize that the difference between the US and the UK is not merely geographical, but social, economic, political, cultural, basically everything. It truly is a foreign country. Makes it a bit more exciting to explore then, no?
--Susan
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