My life at UCL, London - Taka Nagamine



After graduating from AUE and spending half a year as a research assistant, I went on to the masters course (MA; Master of Arts) in Linguistics
at University College London (UCL). UCL has a fame in Linguistics for producing many leading linguists. In Phonetics which I’m interested in
the most, the big names include Daniel Jones, one of the first Phoneticians initiating a systematic description about speech sounds, and J.C. Wells,
who is a primary author of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary.

Main campus at UCL
There were some contrasts between my university life at AUE and UCL, not to mention that I stayed in a different country. Firstly, the class delivery
was totally different from what I’d experienced here in Japan. I registered for some modules, consisting of a series of lectures and tutorials, where I
was able to both study about theories and put them into practice. Whilst the entire course had approx. 50 students, there were only 10 students or fewer
in each tutorial. Lectures were usually delivered by lecturers, followed by a tutorial led by a Ph.D student called a Teaching Assistant. Because of this,
we could combine state-of-the-art theories given by professionals and numerous chances to see how those theories worked in reality.

Another point at which I was surprised at UCL was its strength in research. MA students usually work on a dissertation at the end of the course,
normally with around 10,000 words, where the students are engaged in their own study. I worked on Phonetics with actual recordings of sounds,
and I was glad to have way more research facilities available to me which allowed me to observe and analyse the data in depth. All the lecturers were
involved in many research projects, so the environment was quite stimulative.

Finally, since UCL is one of the most attractive universities around the world, everything was big. The entire campus just looked like a small city;
you might need half an hour to move from one classroom to another. Some people even ride their bicycles for travelling between different buildings!
Accordingly, there were a huge number of students studying at UCL, including UK students, EU students, and students from other areas.
MA Linguistics were especially diverse in this regard; my classmates came from literally all over the world. You could make a round-the-world trip
if you visited each of them. In addition, they’d had different backgrounds in terms of their specialisations or degrees; Architecture, Economics,
Translation, Education, Philosophy etc etc. Some had had work experience as a teacher of English, a journalist, and a lawyer.

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