Clare Hall, University of Cambridge Summer Visiting Student Program Report

2012 Academic Year
Zhou Han : ME in Architecture

Two weeks has already passed. Although not a long time, to me it's been quite a meaningful experience. In this report I will briefly review the two weeks to give a picture of the Summer School.

Beginning of the summer school

• 
  Orientation and welcome talk

• August 5 is registration day. We got our handbook, lecture schedule and the access to the campus Internet.

  In the evening there was an orientation and welcome talk by the director of International Programmes, Mrs. Sarah Ormond.

  The most impressive part of her speech was when she mentioned we were from 41 different countries, and read out all the nations' names. "When you finish summer school you will have friends from 40 different countries, and you can go visit them in your next 40 years' holidays!", she said. It was true. One of the most exciting things about the Summer School is that we can meet and study with people from different cultures.

Lectures in Cambridge

I ultimately participated in two classes. At first I enrolled in three classes, but the content of one class was somehow different from what I expected. In this case we can talk to the professor and drop out of the class freely, as long as we take at least two classes in all.

D07.The sciences in the ancient world

This lecture was mainly about science and philosophy in ancient Greece.

Mr. Piers Bursill-Hall, our professor, is a lovely old English man with a typical British sense of humor. When he talked about people in ancient times, he would compare their behaviour with ours today, which made it much more understandable.

The first class was about the lecture discipline and also focused on how we should see the history of sciences in a rational way, avoiding what is called "Whig historiography", which is to use today's viewpoint to judge the actions and morals of people in the past and try to make a good/bad judgment. According to the professor, we have to consider the social context and technology in their times and only look at the facts. This is not only relevant to the history of science. I believe this kind of thinking is helpful in all of our research related to the past.

In the first two lectures we had a brief introduction of the sciences in ancient Egypt and Babylon. Then we started from early Greece. We talked about Greek politics and how this affected their structure of society and way of thinking. Then we learned about the logical argument that appeared in Greece and how that brought us many famous philosophers, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and so on. We also learnt the theories of the three men. It surprised me that in ancient times people already had rather high abilities in mathematics such that they could tell the movement of the sun, the earth and the stars.

Below is a photo of our classroom. It's located in the English department.

E01.The abnormal mind: an introduction to psychopathology

This is one of the most popular lectures at the Summer School. The professor, John Lawson, is a fashionable kind of man. He always cracks jokes with the students. The atmosphere in this lecture was a bit different from the other one. Many students asked questions during the lecture and the professor answered them, helping everyone to better understand the lecture. As the content is to some extent related to daily life, we had a lot of interaction so that we could experience what the theory might mean as described by ourselves.

We discussed about depression, anxiety, autism and so on.

Life in Cambridge

There were several activities in Cambridge through which we could make friends with other students.

* Lecture Breaks : Between the two lectures in the morning there is a half break that lasts half an hour. Most students would gather in the small square near the teaching building, have a cup of coffee and talk with each other.

The topics discussed were the lectures, cultures, and activities in Cambridge.

* Salsa Dance :There is a classroom of salsa dance opened to students. Not like a club, we could learn real social dancing and everyone in the room practiced together, learning new dancing technics from each other.

* Summer School Ceilidh : It's very traditional dancing in UK, which I have only seen in the movies. The musicians are professors and staff in Cambridge and almost all the students attended. My professor of psychopathology played guitar in the Ceilidh.

On August 17 the Summer School came to a successful end. We registered for the closing dinner in Selwyn College to capture the exciting moment and relive the memories with our classmates.

The dining hall of this college, also where we had our lunches everyday, is very much like that in the movie Harry Potter.

The director gave a closing speech and we received our certificates the Summer School.

[ Sep. 14 2012 ]

Closing Dinner