I’m in the middle of term papers right now, so I thought this would be a good time to attempt to describe Trinity College’s hodge-podge academic system. Roughly it stands midway between Oxford and an American Ivy League. The first confusing aspect of Trinity is that we operate both on the British trimester system and on the American semester system. Michaelmas term started in October and concludes this week; we return in the second week of January to start Hilary term; then we get two or three weeks off in March before Trinity term starts. After Trinity term we have three or four weeks of exams, so that the year officially ends on June 13. Many departments offer their classes on the basis of trimesters, but regardless, all examinations are in June, so that you may take a class which ends in December and not touch the material again until June. Other departments try to mimic the American semester, however since we start the academic year so late, the first semester doesn’t end until the end of January, with Christmas break separating the final two weeks from the first part of the course. Then of course we have departments which only offer year-long courses, and, just to keep life interesting, the science departments offer their classes in hexamester blocks, so that each class meets for only four or five weeks. The system works out for Trinity students, since Trinity students only take classes within their discipline. Notre Dame on the other hand requires of all students numerous courses across the disciplines to achieve a broad liberal arts education. It was very difficult for me to coordinate a schedule across several departments, since the system is designed to work efficiently internally within a discipline but completely breaks down across disciplines.
At Trinity, I am currently taking Analytic Philosophy, and Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel. In the evenings I am also taking Introduction to Irish History, Introduction to Irish Philosophy, and Introduction to Irish Film courses at the O’Connell House through Notre Dame. Philosophy and Theology at Trinity both run on the semester system, so the third week after we get back from Christmas break I’ll switch to Continental Philosophy and Irish-language Literature, the latter of which runs on the trimester system, so I actually have to miss the first few lectures since it conflicts with the tail end of my Analytic course. At the O’Connell House I’ll take Seamus Deane’s Anglo-Irish Literature course and a brand new Irish Language course focusing on building our conversational skills. I’m especially excited about the latter. We’ll have class one night a week, then our second session every week will give us opportunities to practice our Irish in colloquial settings and to tour Irish-speaking Dublin (the radio and television station RTE, and the Irish-speaking cafe in the city centre, for example). We’ll also be required to live in a Gaeltacht (a region in which 90% of daily business is carried out in Irish) in the West of Ireland for the 5 days preceding St. Patrick’s Day. I’m really fortunate to be in the Dublin Programme this year, because they have never offered such a course before, and I did wish at the end of my fourth semester of Irish that we had worked more on fluency and less on translation.
On top of scheduling problems, the biggest challenge at Trinity has been in adjusting to their academic approach. The emphasis is strongly put on independent research and essay-writing. Lectures serve only to augment the research; most students attend very few of their lectures, actually. Probably 25-30 people are registered for my Analytic Philosophy class, yet lecture attendance very rarely exceeds 15. This is considered perfectly normal and acceptable. Lectures also tend to be more focused here than in my experience at Notre Dame. There is no personal exchange between professors and students. The professors walk in, immediately start lecturing, usually accomplish exactly what they had planned for the hour, and then leave abruptly. I recently went to one of my professor’s office hours to discuss my essay with him, and I was a little shocked when 2/3 of the way through our 45 minute discussion he admitted that he didn’t even know my name (I sit in the front, in a room of less than 15 people; I have never missed a lecture; I answer questions and ask my own; and for 5 weeks I had a bright pink cast on my arm).
I couldn’t really say whether Notre Dame or Trinity is harder. Really, they’re just different. Coming in, I definitely had to work to acquire the skills to succeed at Trinity; as a philosophy and theology student at Notre Dame, I have done almost no research in the last two years, and I only use the library when I get sick of studying in my room or LaFortune. I probably do the same amount of reading at both universities, but at Notre Dame you buy all of the books for a course or the professor gives you a course packet; here at Trinity scores of students are stranded in this stony island in the middle of the city to fight to the death over the library’s only copy of a course’s primary source book. I also do a similar amount of writing, just on a different scale. Papers at Notre Dame tended to be 4-8 pages long and spread out throughout the semester, while here papers are due at the end of the trimester and tend to be 10-15 pages. The papers here are harder, though, because at Notre Dame generally we would be given a specific section of a specific book to read and analyze, but here we’re given very broad topics with very long suggested bibliographies and told to run with it.
A good example of this is the Analytic Philosophy essay I turned in this week, which definitely ranks in the top five most difficult essays I’ve ever written. Until I actually started writing it, I really thought that I was going to come up with nothing coherent to turn in. We had been given a list of 7 topics to choose from, all of which baffled me equally. Honestly, I barely understood what most of them were asking. How, then, you may ask, did I go about selecting a topic? Purely out of school spirit, I picked the one that listed the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic in the suggested bibliography, and off I went on my quest to determine whether, as Frege says, numbers are self-subsistent objects, or, according to Bertrand Russell, mere fictions. Within the first three days of my research I discovered that I don’t actually care about the ontological status of numbers, which doesn’t happen to me very often and which made it significantly more difficult to bully myself into spending the obscene number of hours I wound up doing in the library. The effort was definitely worth it, though. At the end of the day I felt like I’d engaged the material much more rigorously than if I’d primarily been going off of the professor’s summary of the arguments or been told where to find my answers.
I’ve never had to work like this before. I spend less time on academic work here than at Notre Dame, but I have to approach it with greater intensity and focus. You really do get out of Trinity what you put in, and it takes and incredible amount of self-discipline and self-motivation.
So I handed 6,000 words in on Monday, and now only 9,000 words stand between me and Christmas. Somehow I’ll have it all turned in by next Friday, the deadline for Michaelmas essays, so that I can start looking forward to the exams in June! Currently I have an image in my mind of how the Grinch’s heart swells to be several sizes to large for the x-ray and bursts through its frame at the end of Dr. Seuss’ classic story, only of my brain capacity in regards to my skull. That is also an accurate representation of my stress level right now, since my entire grade depends upon this week’s batch of essays and the June exams.
