Now they tell me...

A lot of talk is going around the various cafés and seminar rooms of my new academic existence. Much of it is related to how mind-bustingly hard the course is. It's really designed for undergraduate mathematics students. They're having a whale of a time. Piece of piss for them. Triple indefinite integrals over a Lebesgue-measurable Borel set defining the joint distribution of a vector of random variables? Did one before breakfast, they did. Borel sets coming out of their arses and glasses cases.

Still, not a little of this talk is on a closely related subject: that of what to do with those of us who are almost certain to fail the mid-terms. The language of this Masters is not English after all, but the language of post-grad level maths. And for those who don't speak it, there's a nightmare of inner translation to perform before you have any idea what the lecturers are on about.

The general consensus seems to have been reached that at least some of us are going to have to change course.

This being Germany, of course, this should be a feasible prospect. People seem to spend anything up to about seven years here on their university studies, changing course as often as a river over flat ground.

Now I should point out here that I'm not actually among those who are panicking. I kind of think I'm alright. The course is definitely tough, no doubt about it, but I more or less speak Maths and my English is pretty good too (just as an aside: imagine if you will the position of a non-English-native who did business administration at undergrad. Not much maths, not much English. There are several examples in my class. Lord knows how they're coping...).

But in the course of my research into possible alternative courses which a particular friend might like to look at, I found one happening in the building next to ours (the infamous House of Finance, see previous posts) entitled "International Economics and Policy".

Now this seems scarily like the goal I claimed to have when I quit my job and decided to study. I said I wanted to work in policy, doing something a bit mathematical (i.e. economics) and that I wanted to use my languages. Now whether or not I'm actually cut out for such work (or whether I'd actually find it stimulating) is another matter. It just sounded good so I went for it (for those who've known me a long time, refer to my decision aged 15 to become an Engineer. Knew nothing about the subject but it led me to choose nerdy A-Levels and do an engineering degree. This degree is currently gathering dust in the back of some long-forgotten corner of my CV).

So, in short, I'm going to start a bit of research into this supposed dream course. What does it involve? Is it still early enough to change onto it? How is it viewed by the outside world? Are there any nice girls doing it?

All vital questions. And all to be answered in the coming days.

Rob

Decisions, decisions

Eeurgh! It's finally happened. Just like for the child - who thinks she'll never grow up then suddenly, unexpectedly, stops thinking The Radio 1 Chart Show is worth tuning in for - there's no going back. The moment I thought would never come has arrived. I thought I was different. That the aging process was going to be different for me than for others. But I'm just the same as everyone else.

Last week I stayed in on Friday night and, on Saturday morning, felt so amazing that I decided that going out and getting drunk is no longer worth it.

On Friday morning I had woken up feeling like I was never going to be able to get out of bed ever again. I felt like I could see clearly that everything in life was hard and pointless and that I was going to just lie in the dark until summer came, feeding off my own reserves of body fat and the occasional fried cheese sandwich. As I'm sure you can guess, I was horribly hung over.

Compare and contrast this feeling with my joyous, sober weekend, wherein I woke up, showered, breakfasted, did some reading, went swimming, went for a beautiful walk in the hills, did more work, watched Extras on th'internet.

My life is changed. I'm going to officially be boring for the rest of my life.

Apart, of course, from this weekend, when my flatmates, my visitors from Cambridge and I are going to a gold-themed fancy-dress party where I plan to paint myself gold and wear nothing but a pair of gold shorts.

But after this one last blow-out, life is never going to be the same.... Honest.

A miscellany of tales

Here is a short list of funny/noteworthy things that have happened to me recently:

1) Laughable American
I was in Starbucks in the centre of Frankfurt, enjoying an English Breakfast tea with fresh (not UHT) milk, and reading Charles Dickens. I'd like to point out, before the once-gentle reader throws up his hands in self-righteous outrage, loudly bemoaning the lack of German authnenticity of this situation, that I am like a Jewish man in Israel. A Jewish man in Israel doesn't need to go to synagogue or refrain from pig-pocketing (this is not a suitable euphemism for not eating pork, but I liked it so it remained in this sentence). Just by being in Israel he is already Jewish enough, thank you very much. The trappings that we know as Jewish culture are only sops to remind us diasporites what it's all about. Just by being in Germany I'm German enough. All the Grande Caramel Macchiati in the world can't take that away from me.

Anyway, as I say, I was in Starbucks when I overheard, in a laughably poor German accent, the rarely heard phrase "Wo ist der Hard Rock Cafe?". A large lady clearly considered herself essentially to be in a more ubiquitous (and easier to ask questions of) verion of the American Embassy, the German girl behind the counter expected to act as a consoling consolate to the lost and frightened American abroad. When the confusion as to where the Hard Rock Cafe was reached fever pitch, I stepped in and told that lady that, despite my several weeks of cycling around the streets of Frankfurt, I hadn't seen a Hard Rock Cafe. Did she know of there definitely being one in Frankfurt?

Her reply to this question was made infinitely funnier by the crumpled face, knitted brow, and sorrowful tone of a child who's just been told there is no Barack Obama, just her parents in a suit; she said:

"I just kinda assumed there would be"

Ho ho ho.

2) Accidental Children's Party Attendee
It sounded like such a great idea. A start-of-semester party! On campus! Drinks at "Student Prices"!

When the small group of us Economics Masters people arrived at the allotted hour, 3 things rapidly became clear:
i. This year's intake of first-years had, under some mysterious German government rule, been allowed to start university at age 11.
ii. There were one-hundred-and-forty-thousand of these scamps, and all of them had chosen to come to the party, and arrived simultaneously in some unseen, but later dreamed of, horrifying giant school coach.
iii. We were supposed to have brought invitations. Otherwise, the entry fee was five euro. FIVE EURO! To go to a university party on my own campus. Radical action was required.

Word quickly went around our small band of adventuring over-25s that if we could convince someone to let us be their plus one, we could both skip the queue and the entrance fee. I like to think there is no-one better equipped for this kind of challenge than me. I travelled up and down the front one per cent of the queue, shouting that I needed to become someone's plus one right away. After much embarrassed shuffling of feet (Germans = Brits, ha!), I was taken in by one group of weedy saplings who said I could come in with them if I bought them a drink. Needless to say, I teased them with talk of minimum alcohol consumption age, which they greatly enjoyed.

Anyway, to cut what is becoming a very long story short, I lost all of my course-mates via this procedure and spent the whole evening in the company of three 8-year-olds first years, engaged in the following exercise: Male 8-year-old would point out a group of girls he'd like to talk to, if only he was good at talking to girls. I went over to this group of girls and got their attention by saying something funny in English. Winning their favour, I then introduced them to my young, handsome beau. I then withdrew once chat had successfully been established, and knowlingly sipped my Apfelwein waiting for the results to come in. The young lad had two phone numbers by the end of the evening. I consider this a job well done.

3) A willing jump into drudgery
An American coursemate of mine told me that he was applying for a job he'd seen advertised in the House of Finance (see previous post re. Bockenheim and Westend) for a student IT assistant, 10-20 hours a week. He was using this as an example of how poorly Germans used email in comparison to his fellow Americans. He told me tales of waiting a week for a reply to an email. I was shocked and appauled of course. I quizzed him about his credentials in applying for the role and he told me he'd used a piece of Accounting software in his previous job as an accountant. How hard could it be? To be fair on me, I was honest with him at this point. I told him that if so much as one fifteen-year-old with no social skills and reduced literacy applied for the job, then my American friend would stand no chance of getting it, as the fifteen-year-old would trump him for IT experience immediately.

After having a good old laugh to myself about this possible other explanation for the lack of response to his application, I suddenly thought: hey, why don't I apply for the job? It's on campus. It pays well. I could do it with my brain closed, and my CV corroborates it.

So I did.

And the same evening, I had an email asking me to come for interview the following morning.

Now I'm not saying I'll get the job. I'm not even absolutely saying I'll take it if do. But it does demonstrate neatly something I've long suspected about this world of instant communication in which we now live.

If you text/email/call/Facebook/MSN someone and they don't respond, maybe, just maybe, rather than the "too busy/on holiday/out of credit/spam filter malfunction" stuff your loyal friends will have you believe, the person you're trying to get hold of just doesn't want to talk to you.

Auf wiedersehen, pets.

Rob

A tale of two systems

OR

"A short illustrated history of the progress of the University of Frankfurt as seen through the eyes of a disinterested foreigner."

"Really?", exclaimed my besuited, bebooted course-mate with incredulity. "You are going to ze student bar? On ze uzzer campus?! Haff you no idea how dangerous zis is?". He was genuinely concerned for my safety. The prospect of a drink on "the other campus", a mere ten minute cycle ride away, was enough to send a murmur of apprehension and disapproval through the assembled German students. They knew it not. They had seen it not. But they had heard tell, and what they had heard they had not liked. Oh no.

Thus begins my short illustrated history of the Other-ness of the two campuses of Frankfurt University. To each, the other is anathema. The very essence of either (a) exactly why progress must be halted and capitalism reigned in, or (b) exactly why the old systems must make way for a new, brighter, more outward-looking Frankfurt; depending on whom you talk to.

I'll start, if I may, at the beginning: a short glossary to help the peruser of this history understand the key terms used herein.

Bockenheim n. /'bokənhɑɪm/ The site of the first building of the Frankfurt Unversität in 18-hundred-and-something. Now a crumbling, left-wing relic of the 1980's Germany of mullets and oversized knitwear we know from German language textbooks.

Westend n. /'vƐstƐnt/ A former American army base, now the most spangly whizzbang campus in Europe. A centre for conferences, corporate sponsorship and private enterprise. Where I study.

The most important thing to know about Bockenheim campus, is that it is doomed: by 2011, the university wants to have everyone studying in shiny new buildings on the Westend campus, and is not shy about making this desire known. From the look of the Bockenheim campus, this plan to abandon the place has been agreed upon by those who hold the purse strings for quite some time. The place is falling apart. In some cases literally. The centrepiece of the campus is a semi-derelict tower-block, known only as der Turm (the tower), in which all the left-wing subjects have their home: philosophy, politics, sociology, education etc.
The image shown here is Microsoft's satellite view. The place is literally covered in grafitti, mostly political: a mix of anti-Nazi, pro-Israeli (interestingly, the left-wing view here is not anti-Israel like in England) and anti-snob-culture. Much of what happens there is student-led. There are regular (occasionally tense) protests about student fees, equality of access etc. and at least three student-run cafes and bars, all of which are mind-bogglingly cheap and very laid back
(a notable example of this is a place known only by the generic descriptor "Bar abend" wherein the Apfelwein (a local speciality) is €1 a glass, the staff are paid in booze and the doors are open until gone 6).

Contrast this with Campus Westend.

This is my campus, and the location of subjects such as Economics (the tongue-twistingly-entitled Wirtschaftswissenchaften), Law and Finance. The campus opened a mere two years ago, and the novelty of the place is evident everywhere you look. The buildings are beautiful, the lawns are still being grown, and technology reigns supreme. The library is a high-tech wonder, with automatic blinds, individually operated reading lights and student-card-operated lockers. The campus is an available real-estate for private enterprise. Many of the shops and cafes are privately-owned (and 30% more expensive) as is the Alma Mater of my new course, the House of Finance. In this magisterial building, shown left, the lecture rooms are named after the banks which paid for them (leading to odd-sounding timetables: Macroeconomics, 2pm in Deutschebank) and equipped with cameras so powerful they can read handwritten notes from any seat in the room and beam them onto up to 3 projectors at the front. They have their own private security (never a phrase associated with good things for some reason) and students have to use the back stairs, to ensure the lifts are always available for professors and other visiting dignitaries.

The campus as a whole is designed to be a beacon for international conferences and symposia (The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics was held there last week, with much fanfare and free grub).

Needless to say, the restless lefties on Campus Bockenheim are not best impressed, as is witnessed by this message I came across written on a wall of the infamous Turm.

This point was palpably proved (or disproved, depending on who you talk to) by a recent 'occupation' of the aforementioned House by a gang of spray-can wielding Bockenheimers. Official accounts of what happened vary but, by anyone's measure, the results were messy and not entirely non-contact.

This, in large part, explains why my coursemate was horrified at the prospect of me spending a Thursday night in the company of radical layabouts, and why I have to shuffle my feet a little whenever talk amongst my flatmates and new friends turns to the miserable future of their beloved campus. I am, without question, part of the disease and not of the cure. I'm exactly the kind of yuppie foreigner the new campus was designed to attract. I'm studying exactly the kind of cold-hearted subject my Social Science-studying stablemates love to rail against.

I would answer, were I able to adequately expressly myself in this new mothertongue of mine, that I hope to be somewhat different in my studying of Economics. That I will always be bearing in mind that welfare does not equal money, and that what is best for the community as a whole can very well be disastrous for an individual, and that nice people (like me, I like to think) need to be on the inside of the machine where they can influence things for the better, rather than on the outside, where ability to make things different is limited to writing about injustice on walls.

I'm going to close this potted history with my favourite thing I've read so far in my study of Economics. It comes from John Stuart Mill, and seems to be exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about when I tried, internally, to justify myself to the angry Bockenheimers:

"The same persons who cry down Logic will generally warn you against Political Economy. It is unfeeling, they will tell you. It recognises unpleasant facts. For my part, the most unfeeling thing I know of is the law of gravitation: it breaks the neck of the best and most amiable person without scruple, if he forgets for a single moment to give heed to it. The winds and waves too are very unfeeling. Would you advise those who go to sea to deny the winds and waves--or to make use of them, and find the means of guarding against their dangers? My advice to you is to study the great writers on Political Economy, and hold firmly by whatever in them you find true; and depend upon it that if you are not selfish or hard-hearted already, Political Economy will not make you so."

Amazing.

Rob