As any science graduate student (or really any college student) can tell you, it is inevitable that you will encounter a language barrier with a professor at one point or another. What do I mean by language barrier? I mean your professor is from another country, english is definitely not his first language, and while he may actually know english very well, his thick accent prevents you from understanding a word of what he is saying. Case in point, one of my physical biochemistry lecturers has a horribly thick accent. And while under normal conditions I might be able to understand most of what he's saying, at 8 o'clock in the morning, on a Friday, when some other students head is blocking my view and I haven't had any coffee... I just can't understand a damn word. Needless to say it was a frustrating hour of trying to see around some guy's head, read the powerpoint, and understand anything I was supposed to be learning.
To top that off, the discussion for my hormones and behavior class right after was... ah... not the best use of my time. Is it really necessary to keep students in class to explain what we'll be doing in discussion over and over and over again? I got it the first time. We're working in groups to finish a worksheet and someone randomly presents it. Not exactly a difficult concept.
I hope next Friday goes much better. In the meantime, I'll be googling explanations of x-ray diffraction for the rest of the weekend.
*Just for clarification, I have no distaste for people with accents, in fact my mother has a pretty thick filipino accent and I think it's fascinating that professors can come to the good ol' US of A and be able to speak all these tricky scientific terms that sometimes I have trouble pronouncing.
Happy studying, S.
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