Graduate Study at Queen's

More than three months have passed since my arrival at Queen's on August 25, looking backward, the life here can be described in two words: challenging and busy.

It is challenging because most of the experiences are new to me: reading statistic textbook and doing homework with excel, proposing thought questions and writing reaction papers for a discussion course, working as a TA here, refining my speaking skills and know more about teaching and learning at Queen's. These experiences open new doors for me to know about the graduate training and life here. However, as a new international student, all these tasks are time-consuming: to spend 5-6 hours to read the statistic text book and another 6 hours to finish the homework; to spend a whole day (probably more than that) to read the papers or book chapters for the discussion course, propose thought questions and writing the reaction paper, select test items, answer undergraduate student's questions, doing the mark taking a lot of time as well. Besides, I need to regular reading and prepare to talk to my supervisor each day to discuss any research ideas came about and whether it is plausible to conduct a research (or several researches) on that. This leads to the second the characteristic of graduate study here--busy. Actually, I am working about six and a half days every week. However, what make me not feel bad about myself is that a lot of other students are also busy as well: it is regular to see native students working in the lab in the night (some even work on Thanksgiving day), it is also a surpise to see that the 7:30AM bus to campus is always full.

Another thing touched me is that the professors of the courses are really enthuastic about the course they are taught, they really care that students taking the course should have "left in brain" message when they finish the course. For instance, in the Attitude and Attitude Change discussion course, the professor are enthuastic in instilling us the ability to evaluate the quality of a theory or a independent research: what is the assumptions of the theories? How is the research hypothesis builds on previous research? Do the independent variables (IVs) appropriated operationalized and manipulated, do the dependent variables (DVs) sensitive to capture the effects of IVs? Does the data support the research hypothesis and to what extent can you buy the data? Does the research provide convergent evidence for the research questions? Are there any other alternative explanations of the research results, if yes, how can they be excluded? For the statistic course, I am surprised that we need to finish our homework and do data analysis through excel and that excel is such an effective instrument. Another difference from my former statistic in China is that it is focused on the underlying rationale of the statistical methods and why we chose to use one method to do the analysis and how to make sense of data to tell a coherent story rather than on how to do the analysis. The professor trying to make it an interesting experience to learn statistics, the last class, this morning, we went to a restaurant to have breakfast together and just drink coffee, enjoying the food and talking to each other, it is all about sharing and communicating~

Started the Fall Term with an introduction of the discussion course and ending it with a lab party, I am just realized that how time flies, the First term at Queen's is gone, although there still a couple of things to do: the final exam, a teaching presentation, a 20 pages research paper ...... I am glad that I am fortunately to have the opportunity to experience the processes.

On the journey......