Suggestions from:
Merriam Webster online dictionary of English http://www.m-w.com/
Spanish online dictionaries http://www.diccionarios.com/ (Spanish, Spanish verb conjugator, Spanish synonyms, Spanish-English, Spanish-French, Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-German)
Be friendly with your students, but keep that distance that allows you to be still in charge.
Localized versions of the Google search engine have language-specific resources. Check out the tabs on the main page (e.g. web, images, groupes, actualités)
Try searching for anything. A search for "French parts of the body exercises" came back with lots of extra class material.
As simple as it seems--budget your time! I never realized how much I liked sleep until I had to put it off to finish reading that I hadn't started early enough.
General advice |
In order to succeed in our program I would suggest honesty and hard work. And especially love for what you are about to study, even though it might appear, right now, a little blurry. |
| Talk to the older GTFs--sometimes they know important stuff! | |
| Take teaching seriously. It's scary at first and takes up a lot of time, but it can become one of the most rewarding parts of graduate school experience. Everyone has bad days with teaching, but there are so many more days where my class has cheered me up than made me upset. | |
| Mostly though, have fun. It gets stressful, but you can't let the stress get the best of you. | |
Classes |
Take all the classes outside the department that you think you might enjoy, expand your horizons. It lets you look at the things you normally study in a different light. |
| Do your best to keep up with the syllabus in your graduate classes; you’ll get more out of class participation. | |
| Take advantage of professors’ offers to correct your papers or offer feedback. | |
Papers and research |
Study the MLA style manual before writing essays or class papers. Otherwise you have to work twice as hard to rewrite them later. |
| The resources I was not aware of during my first term were the Summit/Orbis catalogue and the Interlibrary Loan through WorldCat (UO library, http://libweb.uoregon.edu). Another good thing to browse is the reference section and the collection of articles in the different databases that appear on the home page of the Knight Library. | |
| Meet with professors. One office hours session can help a term paper so much. I've already asked all the really stupid questions, so don't feel bad about asking something that sounds silly. Go see them well in advance of the due dates for papers and presentations. | |
MA and PhD exams |
This is a good one that some very wise soul shared with me and it is so simple it works: make a small index card note on the major topics discussed, personajes and socio-historical context of ALL readings done AS YOU READ THEM (especially the ones that make the LEAST sense to you) to look back at when you start to organize your thoughts for the ma exams. You might think the notes you took in class have all of this somewhere but... |
| Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway by Nick Mansfield proved to be a great introduction to many of the major postmodern theorists (Freud, Foucault, Nietzche, Lacan, Kristeva etc.). It is approachable, well-written and well-organized and was quite handy when the time for exam-writing came. |