Raymond Rozman reports from the field

Hello all, I'm Raymond Rozman. I graduated from OWU this past May with a BA in Medieval Studies, and now I'm working on my MA at the University of Leeds in England. It took a lot of long hours  to get myself here, but let me tell you, it's payed off in big ways. 

You get to do interesting things as a graduate student. Just yesterday I had my British Battlefields class at the Royal Armories, where we finally got to handle (and wear) arms and armour. Some of the stuff was real, yes (including the back of a breastplate with a rather nasty gash in it), but the suits we tried on were reproductions of pieces in the museum, for obvious reasons. The next two meetings of that class will be held there, where we will be discussing the origins of firepower. More classes in the fun line-up include Paleography and Viking and Anglo-Saxon Heroic Culture, both of those coming up in the spring.

There's a lot of legwork involved, though. Our Latin course is designed to teach us the language (yes, all of it) in a year. I'm doing well enough there, because I've had a decent amount of it before (Thank you, Dr. Fratantuono), but it's not by any means easy. The Research Methods class isn't a cakewalk either. Come to think of it, British Battlefields is actually quite complex too, what with having to think like the commanders in order to understand the situation and terrain, even when the site itself remains relatively unchanged. For each class (I'm enrolled in three, if you haven't been counting), there's about a day's worth of work per week.

I do manage to have fun, though. I've lucked out by having the folks in my department being decently awesome people. We collectively go to pub for dinner, drink and conversation once a week, and on Sundays a house full of the PhDs hosts dinner, with one of us cooking the meal and the rest of us bringing in some other sort of tasty. This is a great way to counter the dismal feeling of eating alone in a dorm, and I know that all of us look forward to these nights each week.

Next time I write I'll tell you more about adjusting to a foreign culture (Britain is surprisingly alien), and how to find your academic niche, or at least how important it is to do so.