I hope there isn’t a major protest if I take just one post to talk about myself rather than Istra (even on this, her one-month birthday). There probably won’t be any pictures of her attached to this entry either. I apologize in advance.
Yesterday I got an email from Ross Arthur, the graduate administrator at York. It was a mass email to all the students enrolled in the Masters program, letting us know vaguely when we could expect to register and pointing us in the direction of the updated course list. When they sent the tentative course list with the acceptance package, I admit that I was a bit disappointed; there wasn’t really anything that I was interested in. That really solidified my plan to do a thesis rather than coursework. But now, it appears that they have added some courses that I think I would find interesting. Right now I’m looking at 6281 3.0(F) SIDNEY, 6282 3.0(W) SPENSER, 6423 3.0(F) VICTORIAN FAITH AND DOUBT, 6450 6.0(Y) STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH FICTION: FIVE WOMEN NOVELISTS, 6881 6(Y) LANGUAGE, GENDER AND POWER.
The first three are where my main interest lies, mostly because the timeframe is approximately the same as Milton, so I feel like if I took these courses I would have more experience in Milton’s general era. I’m also interested in Spenser for his own sake. I’ve never read The Faerie Queene and it’s one of those works that I’ve always wanted to read but never got around to it. It’s quite long and intimidating. The last two courses could either be good or really, really bad. I’m not sure about those, but Dr. Arthur suggested that we make a list of courses that we might like to take, making it a long list just in case spaces were full in the courses that we really wanted.
I also took a peek at the courses that the University of Toronto is offering because in the program at York they allow you to take six credits at another university. There may be a few courses I’m interested in there as well. It would be funny if I ended up there, since they rejected my application and all.
All this is very exciting. I’ve always loved picking my courses during the summer, even in high school! There’s always so much anticipation and hope for a really good year when reading through the course descriptions. Of course, most of the time the classes aren’t exactly what I’d hoped and some of the ones I thought were going to be great turn out to be dreadful, but that brief period of actually perusing and picking courses, planning out the year ahead, is always really enjoyable.
Getting the email from Dr. Arthur reminded me, also, that I hadn’t even looked up my grades for the past year. I didn’t even know for sure if I actually did graduate! So I got up the courage yesterday to look. Here is what I found:
Milton: A
Advanced Russian: A
Russian & East European Film (trans): A
Russian Poetry of the 19th Century: A
Russian Prose of the 20th Century: A
Chekhov: Plays & Short Stories (trans): A
Russian Lit. & Cult.: Petersburg (trans): A+
Winter 2005 Academic Decision: Eligible To Graduate Magna cum Laude. Member Of Dean's Honour Roll.
Despite this being a pretty rough year emotionally, it has turned out to be my best academic performance yet! I’m so surprised that Dr. Pope actually gave me an A in both of his Russian courses—and Prof Dingley too! I did work very hard, but I just expected the A to be unattainable in both cases. It was a very pleasant surprise, needless to say.
Yay me!
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