Hello all!


Greetings from a grey England. Admittedly the weather has been better than I expected, it has actually been sunny a fair amount since I have been here. This is one of the best times of the year though, and November will bring in the cold. It still wont be as cold as the Midwest winters though, or so I keep telling myself. School has been good so far, just ridiculously hectic and busy. Between trying to keep up with my school work, get to know the people on my program, and spend time with my friends who live here, I have had very little time for things like grocery shopping and laundry. However, I am managing, as they like to say in Ghana.

I am living in East London, oh yeah I am an east ender! I told my Irish friend Niall where I am living, the neighborhood is called Bethnal Green. His response was “how very trendy of me.” :) I am very close to Brick Lane, a place infamous for its delicious Indian and Pakistani food. The neighborhood is very diverse, but does have a really high amount of Bengali people (Bengali is the correct term for someone from Bangladesh I recently learned from a woman in my program). There is a vibrant street market everyday and the place is just 15 minutes on the tube from my school.

The program so far has been good, the strength of it is really the amazing diversity in background and experience of my fellow Masters students. I realized how refreshing it is to finally be with people who have been doing the exact same work I have. It is not that my friends now don’t appreciate what I am doing, because they do. But it is different to be with people who have done similar work and can offer advice about past and future experiences. There are 83 people on my masters program from something like 20+ different countries who have worked in something like 50+ different countries. I would say about 30% of the people in my masters are medical doctors. Everyone has worked in public health in a developing country for at least a year, it is a prerequisite for my program.

Anyway let me give you a layout of my program so yall have an idea of what it is like:

Term 1 is from Sep 25 when I started to Dec 19. Term 1 I think is going to be the hardest since I have to take Statistics and Epidemiology. Since I haven’t taken math or science in 12 years, it has been a challenge to get back into the swing of things. I have 3 other classes besides that with lots of reading. I am class for 30 hours every week and have another 20 hours of work to do on top of that (at least). That is the main difference I see from undergrad, I had less class time and more time to get my work done during the day.

Terms 2 is from January 12th to March 27th and term 3 is April 20th to June 21st or so. For the second and 3rd term, I have 2 classes at a time that run for 5 weeks, then I start the next round. So one class runs from Monday morning to 12:30 on Wednesday and then the second class runs from 2 pm on Wednesday til Friday afternoon. My classes end in the beginning of June sometime, then we have 2 weeks of review before exams.

Exams in England are a bit weird, I have 2 major exams in June for all my classes since September. Then after exams I do my masters project and thesis, which is due on September 4th.

The craziness is really that after you subtract the 6 weeks I get for Christmas and Spring Break essentially my classes are crammed into 7 months. And they are obviously very good at fitting as much material as possible into those 7 months.

OK enough about school. I am going out to a club for the first time since I have got here and get to some much needed dancing tomorrow night yay! I am planning on celebrating Halloween with Americans, the plan is to get all dressed up and wander around Soho on a pub crawl. should be fun. I hope to write more when I can but that is it for now. I would love to hear from everybody, just have a bit of understanding if it takes me a few weeks to respond.

For those from Grinnell and IMSA who have recently contacted me, you can read my blogs from when I was living in Ghana below, since my internet time was few and far between there aren’t that many posts.