originalmaja.de

Me again

Uh, I’ve been a fraud today again. I've been asked to name the most difficult things in my studies at Bielefeld University. I wasn’t able to answer, a wave of memories rushed through me – so many question marks, so hard to put them into a perspective, into words. I pretended that I couldn’t think of anything, and I left. If there’s a yogurt or something that tricks the cowardice out of you – write me an email!

One of the most difficult obstacles was and is the whole apparatus of a University, my faculty and departments.

It’s taken as a given that one knows what a faculty is, that one knows you can (and one knows how you) chose courses, that you have heard the word “Fachschaft” before, that you understand the difference between academic and student advisors (I got that pretty late… it’s not, as the wording implies, that the academic advisors are FOR academics… and what an academic is… well… don’t get me started). I certainly did not know how to handle the word “Lehre”, what it all includes, why they nominalized it this weird way, why it is not found on a department’s website, but on a lecturer’s website. I still don’t get what a “Proseminar” is, how it is different from a normal “Seminar”.

My first year I wasted with trying to grasp all this, and I felt so tiny taking in all this frowning when daring to ask; can’t say I took much of the teachings with me, but I did found out that there are “Scheine”! And that lecturers expect me to know what kind of “Schein” I need. Which is fair enough; it’s just tearing one apart when you hear that first time at the end of a semester.

It was all exhaustingly new and absolutely unnecessary. I still find it arrogant to expect an “Abiturient” should know all this. From where, from whom? I tell you: From your parents that (should have) studied before you! It’s disgustingly wrong.

I read all the stuff they gave me, read the Brockhaus entry on Universities and whatnot. I’m not whining, I’m crying! If those information would have been provided beforehand… but they were provided only when asked for it. It still have that little booklet the “Studierendensekretariat” send me that was ought to explain how Bielefeld University functions. It’s full of jumbled infos that first years don’t need – might want, but not need. The need-to-know stuff isn’t in there. And since I started my studies before Wikipedia overviewed the world I live in… there was no one to turn to. I hope so much that the following generation of students don’t have these problems anymore. Cause they are rubbish and exhausting and upsetting.

Text: Marianne Jaffke, www.originalmaja.de