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Student life under lockdown
19th May 2020
News, Student news, Alumni news
So what is it like to be a student in lockdown? Wadham undergraduate Zahra Grieve, (Classics, 2018) shares her experience of third week of Trinity Term.
Zahra Grieve
Zahra Grieve at home
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Sunday 10/05/20
I got up at 8am so I could try and finish off both my essays. At the end of Hilary I had Mods - essentially two weeks of pretty intense exams. Since the beginning of Trinity I’ve started Greats (my finals options), which involves doing two units a term. This term I’m doing Latin core, a big literature paper, and Roman History 5 (RH5), which covers the Roman Republic from 146BC to 46 BC. This means that I’ve got ten essays this term - generally two due on odd weeks, and one on even. On even weeks I have a 2 hour reading class which replaces my normal Latin Core tutorial. By a twist of fate (and some over-zealous doodle polling on my part) both tutorials are on Tuesdays - and so are due Monday night. I quite like this though, as to means I’m quite flexible in my timetable the rest of the week. So far I’m about 1000 words into each - aiming for 2000 for Latin Core and 2500-3000 for RH5.
I spend most the day writing my essays, stopping for breakfast and lunch (and several coffees). The Latin Core one is about the power, function and history of poetry in Vergil’s Eclogues. I find the topic really interesting but struggle with identifying some of the intertextuality and allusions to Hellenistic poets like Callimachus and Theocritus. Tutors, librarians and my faculty have been really great about making the books we need available online - like the commentary’s which indicate specific interplay. This helps massively but it's still difficult to write my essay while referring back to the online books. I normally split my computer screen, which is okay for essay writing but more difficult in tutes.
I have the same issue with the RH5 one, where I keep needing to refer back to the primary texts. This week we’re looking at the popular politicians of the 2nd century, like the Gracchi. The history secondary reading was initially hard to get hold of, but my tutor has since made a lot of PDF's available on Canvas. Canvas is the online learning platform that my faculty is using. It's been a really useful way to share resources for both of my units.