Studying with James & May

So we found a climbing gym in Glasgow to help burn off the stress of Grad school, and I have to say it's working pretty well. I'm a pretty anxious and depressed person broadly, but now that I have a physical outlet for my problems it feels a little less scary. Not to channel all of our mothers but going out and doing fun things makes us feel better, and maybe it'll help you too.

Hey Friends,

I know it’s a little redundant at this point but I am James. I am going to be doing things a little more informally than May, which TBH isn’t abnormal but I’m not ready for formality yet. I will probably be posting a lot of the more off the cuff sounding things but just so you know a little about me: I am hoping to write my MLitt dissertation on the way in which gothic literature and it’s reincarnations shows our political fears and desires for contemporary time; I like rock climbing and curling up with May and binging whatever she has decided we are going to binge; but most of all I like writing, despite my total lack of doing any of it in the last... lets say while. So I guess what you can expect from me is more writing about the day to day nonsense of grad school, like why can’t profs scan things straight. No seriously, just for a sec, WHY ARE THE SCANNED BOOKS ALWAYS SIDEWAYS. Anyway I will talk to you soon, but I hope your night goes as well as everyday does for cats,

Hi guys!

Since James has made a couple posts already, I figured I’d introduce myself. My name is May, and I’m a graduate student in the Information Management & Preservation MSc at the University of Glasgow. It’s a year-long program with the intent of preparing us for working in archives, libraries, and collections as archivists and records keepers. As I graduated from the University of Victoria with a BA in English Literature and Medieval Studies, and I don’t like children and don’t want to teach them, I figured this would be a good career to fall into.

(Honestly, I love working in archives. Medieval manuscripts are truly where my heart lies, so anything I can do to preserve and interact with them is somewhere I desperately want to be. Even when I’m not working specifically with medieval manuscripts, working within a collection makes me happier than anyone should really reasonably be while surviving under the oppressive weight of capitalism.)

I also like horses, and vintage clothes, and musical theatre, and a good cup of coffee. And James, but I figure that’s obvious.

My intent for this blog is maybe a little different than what James is planning, so feel free to use the tags #jamesstudies and #maystudies to filter our posts. To give you a sense of my content, I’m planning on fairly closely documenting our process of getting into grad school, moving countries, and surviving higher education.

This post is already too long, so I’ll end it here. I hope you stick around!

Thanks :)

Hey friends,

So I was taking an easy morning and listening to the pop-punk from my childhood and I thought I'd tell you all what I am still waiting for: debit card, laptop, classes to be selectable, and I am still waiting to make some new friends.

We’re James and May, two postgraduate students who’ve just started our degrees at the University of Glasgow. We’ve recently graduated from the University of Victoria, and we’re planning on documenting our Big Move as well as our Terrifying Degrees here, where everyone can see it, in the hopes of it giving us some sort of accountability or something.

Really, we want to help out. Hopefully by documenting - in one way or another - what we do and how we do it, we can help someone else who wants to do the crazy thing and uproot their life in order to pursue higher education.

(Honestly, I recommend it. It’s only been a week, but it’s been fun so far.)

Thanks in advance for reading. I hope you stay tuned!