Sunday has arrived! Taking a day off to catch our breaths and wait for news of our apartment search. Looks like we will be able to secure a nice 2-bedroom flat about 10 minutes' walk from Uxbridge town centre and about 12 minutes' walk from Brunel University. It's furnished and very nice, but the landlord orginally did not want to rent it to us because I was a student. Sent over my academic/career CV and theatrical resume to the estate agent along with my last paycheck direct-deposit advice from Lakeland to let him know that I was not a typical student, and I think he got the message. The estate agent seemed genuinely embarassed that we had been hassled as much as we had been, and told us that he did not think there would be any problem in renting the flat. (When Maria offered to send him her resume, he held up his hands in an unmistakeable gesture of total surrender and said that this was more than enough information to take to the landlord, thank you very much!)
While we do love Bromley South and Nigel, we do not want to impose on his hospitality too long, so we are anxious to conclude negotiations and move in -- preferably on Monday or Tuesday. My first class meeting in Graduate School starts Thursday afternoon at Brunel, and I'd like to be settled in at Uxbridge long before then. We'll see.
Brunel is quite an extraordinary university, I have found. They have something they call an Open Day, in which prospective students are invited for a tour of the campus and other activities. They had one Thursday, and over 2,000 students showed up -- and I was told that they had an even larger crowd the week before! I find that amazing!
Brunel is also the only university I have ever heard of that offers free foreigh language courses to all its students. For instance, I am taking a Masters in Shakespeare Authorship Studies: no foreign language there, right? I am also signing up for Italian on Wednesday evenings, and will get a proficiency certificate upon completion of the course. ( I am signing up for Italian because it is obvious to me that whoever wrote the works of Shakespeare traveled extensively in Italy, and I want to be able to read any travelogues or diaries of their travels in the native language if they exist. It'll help me brush up my Latin, too!) I may be able to brush up my woeful high school French too, if it doesn't interfere with my Grad school classes. The point is, all this language instruction is free. Why does Brunel do this? The explanation from the head of the department is simple and brilliant: they want Brunel stuents and graduates to have every competitive advantage available to them when it comes to getting a job in the real world, and they know that an employer, faced with two more or less equally qualified candidates, will choose the one with "just one more foreign language" on their resume, especially if it is one relevant to the job skills or communication abilities that they want. If the firm you're appling to has an office in Shanghai and the Brunel graduate has competency in Mandarin, that's a big plus when you apply to an engineering or financial services company. Smart, simple, and brilliant. It's amazing how forward-thinking that is, and it's typical of how much Brunel has impressed Maria and me since we've been here. Although every major building on campus seems to completely and utterly unlike any other building, which is weird to me (coming from a campus that was largely the same type of architecture), each building houses caring and highly competent people who seem to care about the students both while they are here and after they leave.
I am looking forward to seeing Bill Leahy again and meeting my new classmates next week. I hope they are all as eager as I am to begin the new school year! Love to all from London! Have a warm and wonderful Sunday, everyone!
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