Student Blog: Starting Anew in the Semester

This semester, I'm just starting graduate level courses here at Towson University. When signing up for classes, I was nervous about how heavy the workload might be, so I decided to keep it somewhat light. On Mondays, I have a class called Power. We were required to read a postcolonial play-Aimé Cesaire's A Tempest-before the semester started and watch the movie adaptation of the original Shakespearean play. In that class, we take a global look at implications of power and colonialism, filtered through a lens of literature and historical and contemporary events that demonstrate systemic issues. It has been fascinating to dig deeper into writing, literature, art, and theatre through the lens of deconstructing power dynamics.

I take Colonialism, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism as another core class for my degree. That course is taught by a Native American history professor, so we're looking at ideologies of settler colonialism and cultural genocide through scholarship done on Native American studies. After that class, I have another night class called Women, Environment, and Health. That course is in the Women's Studies department, but it is taught by a prolific professor who has down work in her native Kenya and in Harlem-two areas I didn't know much about the environmental impacts on women, but are very much permeating into everyday life today. Taking these three courses in tandem has been quite the experience, especially considering how interconnected they all are with the research and overarching themes throughout literature, history, and oppression.

So far, the first few weeks have been exhilarating, thought-provoking, but also very challenging. A lot of the ideas brought up in my class are concepts and characteristics about society I thought I knew well, and I have been forced to dig deeper into what notions of history, art, and decolonization mean to other groups of people. It has been eye-opening, especially considering I have about the equivalent of six hundred pages of articles, books, and journals to read every week. It has been demanding with my work schedule and the time I need for leisure, but, as many people have told me, this is the beauty of what you get out of graduate school. A lot of my classmates are coming from all walks of life, so learning from them and my professors has been an experience that I will most likely cherish for the rest of my life, even if it is only my first semester in this program.

There's one thing for certain, despite all of the work: things are looking good already.