The Upcoming Semester
Even though I’m still in the middle of the semester break, I’m becoming more and more nervous about the upcoming semester which starts on 19th October. It will be my last “real” semester at my university, since I only need to take three more classes to fulfill my curriculum. Out of these three, I will have to take one exam, which will be in the form of a presentation at a conference in February on front of about 20-50 people. For this conference, I will also have to take part in a project seminar which organizes the conference, making this a forth (though not a proper) course I will have to take. I’m actually feeling a bit sad about the fact that I only need three more seminars – sad that I’ll be missing out on a lot of really cool future seminars! So after the upcoming semester, the only thing I’ll have to do is write my master’s thesis, for which I will have six months.
Only three seminars sounds like I’d be having a very slim schedule, but quite the opposite is the case. Rather than only those three slots, my uni schedule will have eight slots, and this is because of two reasons. The first reason is that I am also doing the “Zusatzqualifikation Deutsch als Fremdsprache” (additional qualification for German as a foreign language), which someday might allow me to teach German to adults (though in reality, I’d probably need more qualifications and experience for that). For this, I will have to take two courses, in both of which I will also have to prepare a 45 minute presentation / session preparation (ugh)…
The second reason that my schedule will be crowded that I will be teaching two tutorials for bachelor students. I’ve been wanting to do this pretty much ever since I started studying, and now that I was finally offered these two tutorials, I’m slightly panicking. I really hope this won’t turn into a disaster of me talking in circles for an hour while 20 people sit in front of me with blank stares. I’ll try my best to actually get them actively thinking with group work and stuff like that, but since I haven’t really started preparing anything, I’m getting more nervous about this. But before I can do that, my priority is still to finish writing my current term paper which is due in October. I’m making pretty good progress, but I still need to write another four pages and only then can I enter the editing phase.
Finally, another minor aspect that will probably contribute to lack of time next semester is that I’ll be supervising a seminar on e-learning. I’ll be the first-level support person for the students taking that seminar while they create e-learning modules for students of lower semesters. That seminar, however, will be a blockseminar, taking place only on 4 full days spread over the entire semester.
Even though I’m really nervous about those two tutorials I’ll be teaching, I’m also looking forward to the last three courses I’ll be taking. Only one of those will be a literature seminar on anglophone graphic novels, while two will be linguistics classes – one on sociolinguistics and one on statistics (which I think will be quite helpful for my master’s thesis). But since I don’t know the lecturers of those last two classes yet, I really hope they’ll be great lecturers and the courses will live up to my expectations, so I won’t have to make any last-minute decisions to switch to other seminars.
Wow, preparing a conference (in whichever scale) is quite a good experience – for you and your CV.
Teaching seems very daunting at first but you soon ease into it. I couldn’t sleep the last few nights before my first tutorial but then it was ok as I knew my stuff and students are actually, mostly nice people.
Thank you for the reassuring words! 🙂 I guess one of the problems why I’m nervous is that I’m scared I’ll have forgotten so much of the stuff I’m supposed to be teaching. It’s been four years since I took the course myself, and even though I aced it with ease, I really need to read up on it a little bit…
The other tutorial I’ll be teaching is on academic writing, which is less straightforward… I’ll have to make a syllabus for that from my predecessor’s materials…
A presentation? I feel your nervousness and anxiety right off this blog post, but I know you got it down. Try this technique if you ever feel like anxiety is taking over, take a deep breathe, and do what they call “grounding” you can find more information about it online, but basically it is focusing on all your senses and yourself internally. That should calm you down and make the presentation less scary, or you can use that whenever. Of course, I would know this, because I’m trying out this technique too, so I don’t freak out and whatnot.
Good luck! You’ll do good!
Though that upcoming semester seems daunting, you can do it! ^^
Thank you! Thankfully it will not be my first presentation, since I had about 8 presentations last semester – it was a really crazy semester for presentations. But I’m much more relaxed about it now after those experiences. Still, the conference will be my first “public” presentation, so it’ll be a little bit different…