The first thing that I did when I got to my British university was run out of money. Those of you Americans considering studying in the UK, keep this in mind: American checks take between two and six weeks to clear through a UK bank. And financial aid from the US Department of Education will come in the form of a paper check mailed to your British university. The best thing to do is sign over these checks immediately to the university. They take out money for university fees and then give you the rest about two weeks later. Being used to my financial aid arriving like clockwork each quarter at my american university, this delay came as a surprise to me. I would recommend either taking a year off to save up some money, or selling your car before you leave for the UK. Even after selling a lot of my possessions the summer before I left, I was eating crackers and Nutella for most meals during the first two weeks of my program.
Still, I was excited to be there, happy to meet new people, and having fun exploring Brighton. I was put in an off-campus house for postgraduate students, in a nice area a few steep blocks up from the seaside. My ten housemates were from ten different countries: Holland, Canada, England, Russia, Pakistan, Kenya, Nigeria, Japan, Mexico, and Ecuador. The house was an old three story converted for student use, with a shared kitchen and a large back garden. The house next door was also a postgraduate house, filled with a similar hodgepodge of nationalities, and in good weather we would sometimes get together in one of the gardens for a birthday party or a potluck dinner.
In the first week, I had my program orientation at the university campus, a twelve-minute train ride away from Brighton Station. There was a general orientation for everyone in the department, and then we split into our specific MA groups. My group went to a nearby classroom. It was a small group, and became even smaller when I learned that a lot of the other students were part-time, and wouldn't be having classes with the full-timers, of which I was one. We each partnered up with another student to talk about our writing and get to know each other a bit. Afterward a buffet lunch was served in the building's cafe. I started to talk to the only other person on the programme who was near my age. We left the cafe and sat on a bench outside and talked about ourselves, writing, reading, and books. And that's how I met my now fiance, Big Chimp.
The program itself wasn't quite what I was expecting. We spent only one day a week in class, with the weeks alternating between creative writing workshops and authorship theory classes. There were no exams, but a 5,000 word essay or creative peice due for each class each term, and a 20,000 word dissertation due at the end of the summer.
What I wasn't expecting was all of the free time I had. It was nice, to be sure, but judging from what I'd seen of master's programs at my American university, I had been expecting something more in depth. This seemed to be a common sentiment among my American friends, who were studying English, media, and international criminal law, so I don't think it was exclusive to the creative writing program. English universities are just set up differently. They expect you to do more work on your own and spend less time with instructors. Personally, for the amount of money it cost, I would have preferred more than one day a week of classes (although to be fair, the one day did last all day long). It wasn't that I didn't have to work, because I did, but I had grown used to the way things were at my American university: intense, fast-paced, and crammed full of lectures, discussion sections, quizzes, exams, reading, and essays. And to be honest, that's still the way I prefer to learn. But I guess the take-away lesson here is: a degree program is what you make of it. Especially in Britain, where the onus is on you, the student, to make the program work for you. As the old saying goes, the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it.
However that's not to say that the program was bad. I learned plenty from it. It was a new program at the time, and there were definitely kinks to iron out. And I wish I had had a clearer idea of what I wanted to write, so I wouldn't have ended up changing projects several times throughout the year. But there was value in what I was learning, and the most important thing I took away from the program was learning to see myself as a writer. Not someone who wants to be a writer when she grows up, but someone who already is a writer, someone who works hard at writing with the goal of someday being published. And there were smaller, just as important things -- avioding elegant variation, watching those adverbs didn't get out of control, making sure setting was present in each scene, etc, etc.
My American friends who were also studying for MAs at my university all seemed to agree: our programs, while not bad, didn't seem to be worth the hefty international fees we were paying for them. However, the experience of living for a year in England -- specifically of living in as vibrant a city as Brighton (Britain's most progressive, laid back, artisitic and all-around awesome city) -- of traveling (I visited France and Morocco that year, as well as taking a road trip around Britain with Big Chimp), of meeting new people (like my amazingly cool friend Pauline, from Kenya, and of course Big Chimp, my soon-to-be husband), of just having the experience of this amazing adventure -- that was worth so much more than money could buy.
Next time: My MFA Experience, Part 3: Struggles
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