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highlyeccentricI had thought about writing summative posts every month, but my housing situation was too precarious and stressful at the end of September to even think about it. I might aim for bi-monthly instead? Those following me either on DW/LJ or Facebook have probably got a reasonable idea of what my life has been like since I got here, so feel free to skip or skim - part of the purpose of this post is that I can fling links at non-social-media-using relatives if it seems useful.
Dear friends, family, internauts, and terminally curious persons,
It may have reached your notice that I have moved to Geneva. I arrived here after about a month of gallivanting around the UK and southern France, pictures of which you can find in public posts under the travel tag, although if you're coming to this post late you may need to scroll back through to Sept-October to find where I posted them.
The purpose of this relocation was employment, and that's working out very well. I have an odd sort of job-and-study contract, quite unlike what a doctoral student gets in Australia, the UK or the US. I'm contracted here as a junior member of staff, on 70% of full-time, and on what is for Switzerland a rather low salary. I teach two classes a year, which is supposed to take up 40% of my contracted hours; 40% of my contracted hours go to research, and 20% to admin, although I haven't yet been assigned any. That's a standard distribution of time for a research-and-teaching academic (although the calculation of how many class hours = 40% of full time is generously low here in Geneva). My research allocation for the next 4-5 years will be my doctoral thesis, supervised by the professor of medieval English lit.
This is a bit of a different set-up to what I had in Sydney during my M.Phil (and what most Aus/UK postgrads get), in that my teaching load is locked in in advance, and is not paid separately from my research money. Since I've found that I don't function terribly well as a researcher if I don't have teaching to break up my week and force me to interact with other human beings, I see this as a massive improvement. Also unlike most Australian postgrads, I'm expected to develop my own courses - a once-yearly seminar to complement the lecture-only stream in medieval literature.
The department here is small and tight-knit. The doctoral assistants seem to be reliably treated as junior members of staff, part of the 'corps intermediat' (between students and professors). We were, for instance, automatically included in the corps-intermediat meeting to discuss staff priorities w/r/t the new proffessorial hire that's coming up. We have no say in the ultimate decision of course, but neither do the junior lecturers - point is that our input was canvassed.
In the course of that meeting it became very clear that collegiality is highly valued in the department, and I think that's obvious in many other ways too. Given that most members of the department seem to prefer to work remotely if they're not actually teaching, and the university isn't even located on a single campus, they're a remarkably tight-knit group with a lot of activities going on in that grey zone between 'professional gathering' and 'social event'.
I don't have any photos of my office and it's just a boring office block above a theatre, anyway. Here, have a photo of my precious teapot and bright cup (the first things I bought in the op-shop when I got here):
So that's the department. The University itself is a bit of a culture-shock to me: widely dispersed; no equivalent of the USyd Union; apparently very few parties or functions or even clubs at a university-wide level. Here's a photo of the Bastions Lawns (Bastions is mostly occupied by the Faculty of Letters) during Rentrée, the equivalent of O-Week:
Bit of a contrast, no?
Having said that, the low student numbers and compulsory first-year courses in most programs seems to encourage a more tight-knit cohort than Arts at Sydney does. As one of my students said to me after the first class: 'I thought I was going to hate it here, but I've made more friends in two weeks than I ever did at school!' So some things about uni remain consistent, it seems.
A brief word about students: I love them all, they are the bestest. We have a three-hour class on Thursday nights to work on Hamlet and writing skills: I've organised a snack roster, so we always have a sugar-hit. They're funny, enthusiastic, kind, and at least half of them are seriously geeky. I wish to smish them all. Instead I have failed their essays. Ummm...
The content, expected performance, and actual performance are all quite different here compared to Sydney. The content is very strict close-reading analysis training in first semester, and students don't get any choice over that or the parrallel linguistics curriculum. The fail-bar for essays is a fair bit higher, and the average performance a fair bit lower than I'm used to. What's interesting is that the worst essays were better than the inevitable worst essays in any batch at Sydney. There just weren't the same high-level performers, which I think is not just a matter of language barrier but also the different generic expectations of literature essays in French lit - so even the fluent speakers have been trained to do some very odd things.
So much for things that are fairly consistent. Things that are different (aside from language and administrative hell; I'll get to those): this move has been really easy for me! I'm not significantly more lonely here than I often was in Sydney! It's been easy to meet people and to get out and do things - both logistically, thanks to a great expat social networking site and having had the good fortune to meetleareth, and personally. I'm not wrangling with anywhere near the level of social anxiety I've had with every other major move in my life. I miss kayloulee a lot, but that would have happened even if I'd stayed in Sydney, since she's gone to Canada.
A word on this, before I recap Fun Things: I'm still not what you'd call mentally *well*. Or, well, I probably don't meet the DSM diagnostics for major depression at the moment, even though October has been a hard month depression-wise - but I'm reliably medicated and I'm still moody and having identifiable rough patches. I had a bad run with general anxiety in the first few weeks after I arrived, as I did in the week or two before leaving Australia: there were many meltdowns and I burned up a lot of phone credit having hysterics at Dr J (that, for family and the terminally curious, is my English boyfriend). So. When I say I'm finding this move emotionally easy, I mean it doesn't seem to have spun me out, or restarted social anxiety on top of my accustomed mix of moderate anxiety/depressoin, or made them worse (... yet. Ask me again by late winter...) or caused me to feel abandoned or lost or ruined any friendships I particularly cherished.
In fact, an observation of Dr J's during our time in the UK, after we'd met up with one uni friend and three internet friends of mine, seems apt: "You'll be just fine, won't you? You've got friends everywhere." That's... about right. Although I am greatly aided by the fact thatfahye, a friend of mine from college, has friends everywhere, and she put me in touch with leareth, who knows where all the geeks are in Geneva.
I still have a huge list of things I want to get out and see and/or do, but have some photos of Geneva:
Sensible people buy their fruit & veg in the market, where it's MUCH cheaper than the supermarket. Above is the small market in Carouge, south of the River Arve; I usually shop in Plainpalais, about 10 minutes from my house.
(Turkish Coffee at Plainpalais)
Figuring out where to find Asian foods has been a bit of a quest - some you can get at the markets;leareth has introduced me to a few pan-asian or specific stores, and I've found an 'international grocer' who not only do Indian spices, but also hard-to-find British goods, like brown sugar and golden syrup. I'll have to go to the American Market to get baking soda, it seems, though.
I moved in with my current housemates - two lovely young professional women (Korean, Costa Rican) - with the beginings of my spice collection, and they kept asking me "But... why do you eat Asian food?", like a white girl with chilli powder was the weirdest thing they'd seen for a while. I just had to spread my hands and say "I'm Australian! We do that!" Actually everyone keeps asking me what Australian food constitutes. Last week one of those conversations turned into a bonding session with the only two Asian students in my class about the wonders of Penang curry and how rare it is here (I'd found a Penang packet mix in one of the storesleareth took me to).
Meat is astronomically expensive here - I saw rump steak on special for 39 CHF a kilo! - so I avoid it.
Cheese is comparatively cheap, though: here's a frittata topped with Emmental cheese. Fancy-pants.
I went to the Japanese Festival hoping for tasty deliciousness. Got huge queues and remarkably little of interest. Geneva is a bit like Canberra - very small, full of lawyers and public servants, economically top-heavy, and not much to do so everyone goes to every public event, but the Canberra Multicultural Festival leaves the Japanese festival here dead in the water, both for interest and organisational efficiency.
I've spent surprisingly little time in the Old City. The weekend I took this photo, I shortly discovered I'd left my wallet at home and couldn't enter the archaeological museum, so went home with my tail between my legs.
Early modern frontage, I think, on a surprisingly old cathedral - it goes back to the 10th century at the foundations. I'd know more if I'd been able to enter the archaeological museum!
Lots of parts of town I find endearing, with their shutters and windowboxes. I'm charmed by anything older than about 100 years, so Europe is great for me.
Whoever is in charge of the exterior of this building deserves a gold star. Also, pleasingly, Geneva's only gay bar is right next to this, on the other side.
Lac Leman (Lake Geneva to furriners) is stunningly gorgeous.
I've not been on the lake ferries yet, but I have plans for next spring, involving a castle only accessible by ferry. Also, lookit those mountains. Those are, by swiss standards, baby mountains, the sort other cantons (er... counties, is the best translation) laugh about. I gawp at them, a lot. THEY'RE RIGHT THERE. Just out my window!
And here they are, with their first snow for the year (we haven't had a fall in the city yet, thank goodness - my winter coat is STILL IN SHIPPING AAARGH).
Autumn on the Arve...
This is the Arve in the other direction. Soon I need to take a walk about 15 min down the bank to where the Arve and the Rhone meet - the Arve is greenish, shallow, and often muddy, and the Rhone is deep blue glacier-melt. Apparently their meeting is a famous sight.
Other facts of note: I've joined an English-language drama club, and am going to be 'production assistant' (aka dogsbody) on a production coming up next March. I'm in a casual playreading tomorrow, in fact. I've taken up role-play gaming - a friend ofleareth's is conducting a group of us on a postapocalyptic sci-fi quest to visit the mutants inhabiting planet earth. It's pretty fun. I have a lot of baking ahead of me this month: I'm providing snacks for class the week of the exams; I'm 'hosting' (and therefore snack-providing) the doctoral research workshop later in the month; and RPG group are coming to my place for lunch and four hours of adventure in a couple of week's time. This is all good, as I like feeding people, but I need to acquire more kitchen gadgets quite rapidly.
I'll be spending my birthday in the UK with Dr J, and catching up with one of my former students from Sydney while I'm there. It's Reading Week (no classes) in Geneva that week, but I'll have marking and probably advice-giving to do by email. My doctoral proposal goes up before the College of Professors on the 5th of November, so hopefully I get a 'congratulations you're on the books' email for my birthday.
Aaaand that's about it. Let us conclude with this view of the sunset and the back of the Science faculty, out my bedroom window:
Dear friends, family, internauts, and terminally curious persons,
It may have reached your notice that I have moved to Geneva. I arrived here after about a month of gallivanting around the UK and southern France, pictures of which you can find in public posts under the travel tag, although if you're coming to this post late you may need to scroll back through to Sept-October to find where I posted them.
The purpose of this relocation was employment, and that's working out very well. I have an odd sort of job-and-study contract, quite unlike what a doctoral student gets in Australia, the UK or the US. I'm contracted here as a junior member of staff, on 70% of full-time, and on what is for Switzerland a rather low salary. I teach two classes a year, which is supposed to take up 40% of my contracted hours; 40% of my contracted hours go to research, and 20% to admin, although I haven't yet been assigned any. That's a standard distribution of time for a research-and-teaching academic (although the calculation of how many class hours = 40% of full time is generously low here in Geneva). My research allocation for the next 4-5 years will be my doctoral thesis, supervised by the professor of medieval English lit.
This is a bit of a different set-up to what I had in Sydney during my M.Phil (and what most Aus/UK postgrads get), in that my teaching load is locked in in advance, and is not paid separately from my research money. Since I've found that I don't function terribly well as a researcher if I don't have teaching to break up my week and force me to interact with other human beings, I see this as a massive improvement. Also unlike most Australian postgrads, I'm expected to develop my own courses - a once-yearly seminar to complement the lecture-only stream in medieval literature.
The department here is small and tight-knit. The doctoral assistants seem to be reliably treated as junior members of staff, part of the 'corps intermediat' (between students and professors). We were, for instance, automatically included in the corps-intermediat meeting to discuss staff priorities w/r/t the new proffessorial hire that's coming up. We have no say in the ultimate decision of course, but neither do the junior lecturers - point is that our input was canvassed.
In the course of that meeting it became very clear that collegiality is highly valued in the department, and I think that's obvious in many other ways too. Given that most members of the department seem to prefer to work remotely if they're not actually teaching, and the university isn't even located on a single campus, they're a remarkably tight-knit group with a lot of activities going on in that grey zone between 'professional gathering' and 'social event'.
I don't have any photos of my office and it's just a boring office block above a theatre, anyway. Here, have a photo of my precious teapot and bright cup (the first things I bought in the op-shop when I got here):
So that's the department. The University itself is a bit of a culture-shock to me: widely dispersed; no equivalent of the USyd Union; apparently very few parties or functions or even clubs at a university-wide level. Here's a photo of the Bastions Lawns (Bastions is mostly occupied by the Faculty of Letters) during Rentrée, the equivalent of O-Week:
Bit of a contrast, no?
Having said that, the low student numbers and compulsory first-year courses in most programs seems to encourage a more tight-knit cohort than Arts at Sydney does. As one of my students said to me after the first class: 'I thought I was going to hate it here, but I've made more friends in two weeks than I ever did at school!' So some things about uni remain consistent, it seems.
A brief word about students: I love them all, they are the bestest. We have a three-hour class on Thursday nights to work on Hamlet and writing skills: I've organised a snack roster, so we always have a sugar-hit. They're funny, enthusiastic, kind, and at least half of them are seriously geeky. I wish to smish them all. Instead I have failed their essays. Ummm...
The content, expected performance, and actual performance are all quite different here compared to Sydney. The content is very strict close-reading analysis training in first semester, and students don't get any choice over that or the parrallel linguistics curriculum. The fail-bar for essays is a fair bit higher, and the average performance a fair bit lower than I'm used to. What's interesting is that the worst essays were better than the inevitable worst essays in any batch at Sydney. There just weren't the same high-level performers, which I think is not just a matter of language barrier but also the different generic expectations of literature essays in French lit - so even the fluent speakers have been trained to do some very odd things.
So much for things that are fairly consistent. Things that are different (aside from language and administrative hell; I'll get to those): this move has been really easy for me! I'm not significantly more lonely here than I often was in Sydney! It's been easy to meet people and to get out and do things - both logistically, thanks to a great expat social networking site and having had the good fortune to meet
leareth, and personally. I'm not wrangling with anywhere near the level of social anxiety I've had with every other major move in my life. I miss kayloulee a lot, but that would have happened even if I'd stayed in Sydney, since she's gone to Canada.A word on this, before I recap Fun Things: I'm still not what you'd call mentally *well*. Or, well, I probably don't meet the DSM diagnostics for major depression at the moment, even though October has been a hard month depression-wise - but I'm reliably medicated and I'm still moody and having identifiable rough patches. I had a bad run with general anxiety in the first few weeks after I arrived, as I did in the week or two before leaving Australia: there were many meltdowns and I burned up a lot of phone credit having hysterics at Dr J (that, for family and the terminally curious, is my English boyfriend). So. When I say I'm finding this move emotionally easy, I mean it doesn't seem to have spun me out, or restarted social anxiety on top of my accustomed mix of moderate anxiety/depressoin, or made them worse (... yet. Ask me again by late winter...) or caused me to feel abandoned or lost or ruined any friendships I particularly cherished.
In fact, an observation of Dr J's during our time in the UK, after we'd met up with one uni friend and three internet friends of mine, seems apt: "You'll be just fine, won't you? You've got friends everywhere." That's... about right. Although I am greatly aided by the fact that
fahye, a friend of mine from college, has friends everywhere, and she put me in touch with leareth, who knows where all the geeks are in Geneva.I still have a huge list of things I want to get out and see and/or do, but have some photos of Geneva:
Sensible people buy their fruit & veg in the market, where it's MUCH cheaper than the supermarket. Above is the small market in Carouge, south of the River Arve; I usually shop in Plainpalais, about 10 minutes from my house.
(Turkish Coffee at Plainpalais)
Figuring out where to find Asian foods has been a bit of a quest - some you can get at the markets;
leareth has introduced me to a few pan-asian or specific stores, and I've found an 'international grocer' who not only do Indian spices, but also hard-to-find British goods, like brown sugar and golden syrup. I'll have to go to the American Market to get baking soda, it seems, though.I moved in with my current housemates - two lovely young professional women (Korean, Costa Rican) - with the beginings of my spice collection, and they kept asking me "But... why do you eat Asian food?", like a white girl with chilli powder was the weirdest thing they'd seen for a while. I just had to spread my hands and say "I'm Australian! We do that!" Actually everyone keeps asking me what Australian food constitutes. Last week one of those conversations turned into a bonding session with the only two Asian students in my class about the wonders of Penang curry and how rare it is here (I'd found a Penang packet mix in one of the stores
leareth took me to).Meat is astronomically expensive here - I saw rump steak on special for 39 CHF a kilo! - so I avoid it.
Cheese is comparatively cheap, though: here's a frittata topped with Emmental cheese. Fancy-pants.
I went to the Japanese Festival hoping for tasty deliciousness. Got huge queues and remarkably little of interest. Geneva is a bit like Canberra - very small, full of lawyers and public servants, economically top-heavy, and not much to do so everyone goes to every public event, but the Canberra Multicultural Festival leaves the Japanese festival here dead in the water, both for interest and organisational efficiency.
I've spent surprisingly little time in the Old City. The weekend I took this photo, I shortly discovered I'd left my wallet at home and couldn't enter the archaeological museum, so went home with my tail between my legs.
Early modern frontage, I think, on a surprisingly old cathedral - it goes back to the 10th century at the foundations. I'd know more if I'd been able to enter the archaeological museum!
Lots of parts of town I find endearing, with their shutters and windowboxes. I'm charmed by anything older than about 100 years, so Europe is great for me.
Whoever is in charge of the exterior of this building deserves a gold star. Also, pleasingly, Geneva's only gay bar is right next to this, on the other side.
Lac Leman (Lake Geneva to furriners) is stunningly gorgeous.
I've not been on the lake ferries yet, but I have plans for next spring, involving a castle only accessible by ferry. Also, lookit those mountains. Those are, by swiss standards, baby mountains, the sort other cantons (er... counties, is the best translation) laugh about. I gawp at them, a lot. THEY'RE RIGHT THERE. Just out my window!
And here they are, with their first snow for the year (we haven't had a fall in the city yet, thank goodness - my winter coat is STILL IN SHIPPING AAARGH).
Autumn on the Arve...
This is the Arve in the other direction. Soon I need to take a walk about 15 min down the bank to where the Arve and the Rhone meet - the Arve is greenish, shallow, and often muddy, and the Rhone is deep blue glacier-melt. Apparently their meeting is a famous sight.
Other facts of note: I've joined an English-language drama club, and am going to be 'production assistant' (aka dogsbody) on a production coming up next March. I'm in a casual playreading tomorrow, in fact. I've taken up role-play gaming - a friend of
leareth's is conducting a group of us on a postapocalyptic sci-fi quest to visit the mutants inhabiting planet earth. It's pretty fun. I have a lot of baking ahead of me this month: I'm providing snacks for class the week of the exams; I'm 'hosting' (and therefore snack-providing) the doctoral research workshop later in the month; and RPG group are coming to my place for lunch and four hours of adventure in a couple of week's time. This is all good, as I like feeding people, but I need to acquire more kitchen gadgets quite rapidly.I'll be spending my birthday in the UK with Dr J, and catching up with one of my former students from Sydney while I'm there. It's Reading Week (no classes) in Geneva that week, but I'll have marking and probably advice-giving to do by email. My doctoral proposal goes up before the College of Professors on the 5th of November, so hopefully I get a 'congratulations you're on the books' email for my birthday.
Aaaand that's about it. Let us conclude with this view of the sunset and the back of the Science faculty, out my bedroom window:
