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