Wednesday 8 October 2008

Final timetable II


Constitutional - Const. / Contract - Contr. / International - I / Land - L / Supervision (i.e. not a lecture) - S / Tort - T / Week One or Two - W1/2

Monday
9am: Const., 12pm: T, 3pm: IS (W2)
Tuesday
9am: I, 10am: Contr., 12pm: T, 5pm: TS (W2)
Wednesday
9am: L, 10am: I, 11am: Const., 3pm: Contr. (W2), 5pm: L (W1)
Thursday
9am: L, 10am: Const., 12pm: Contr., 3pm: Const. (W2)
Friday
10am: Contr., 11am: T, 12pm: L

To explain the Week One and Two part, similar to other universities, Cambridge operates on a numbered weekly system (although different in that their terms only last eight weeks), beginning with one on the first Thursday of the academic term and finishing with eight on the final Friday (more information about Cambridge terms can be found here).

Supervisions alternate on either odd or even weeks; at the minute I've got four supervisions in one, and one in the other, which isn't the ideal arrangement, and hopefully I can change Tort over in Week three, so I'll have work for a fortnight, but then things can even themselves out.

I'll be in a group of anything from two to four for these, and normally have to travel all over the place as the people teaching are spread between four colleges (including my own). My lectures 'officially' start tomorrow, but I've been on the go the past couple of days arranging appointments with the supervisors for the supervisions, and we've already been set quite a bit of work; something which is pretty daunting when you have a grand total of no legal knowledge at present!

I'll try and post later regarding what I've learnt about books.

Monday 6 October 2008

Final timetable


At the minute my timetable is looking (reasonably) spacious, I have lectures from 9am to 12pm most days, aside from Thursday where I get to get up at 10, and then supervisions Mondays through to Wednesdays at 3pm or later. I've been to two of the three introductory lectures that were held in the first week, as the last one clashed with some events that were going on in my college, but I plan to go to the repeat series next weekend.

I'll post the final draft of my timetable when I've confirmed all my supervisions; at the minute I've only seen my supervisors for International, Tort and Constitutional, which leaves Land and Contract. I'm seeing these last two to arrange appointments on Tuesday and Wednesday.

It also looks as if I'll have to write an essay for each of these classes once every two weeks, probably no longer than 2000 or so words. Encouragingly, they seem to be keen for me to use my own intuition and thought quite a lot, which is a huge change from my previous degree, where the standard of excellence was a wide variety of quotes and references!

Oh, I should also mention that all those classes (aside from International) are mandatory modules, but there is actually one selective module of the first year of the Affiliated course; a choice between that and Civil Law. I'll also post more about books and other things soon.