This haiku refers to a previous: Morning Lecture, in which only my shadow seemed to know the way to Tsinghua.
This visit, my shadow seemed a little faded - from time, from travelling the length of China. I was determined to keep my commitment of giving a lecture in the Department of Computer Science, which turned out to be followed by a lunch of such magnitude that my shadow was soon looking much stronger.
The image that makes the haiga is from another academic visit; it is a cheeky mix of image and haiku, because, as the academics among you may know, the photograph is not of Tsinghua, but of The Other Place.
I grew up in The Other Place, and so the traditional rivalry doesn't really work on me. That said, whenever I go to Cambridge on academic business, it does feel entirely alien. I no longer associate it with being "home".
This particular trip reminded me of my Tsinghua faded-shadow-trying-to-find-lecture experience. One of the oddities of being appointed a faculty member last year is that I now get e-mails from absolute gurus in my field (even though I am but a hopeless stripling) asking me to (i) read a student's 250-page thesis, and (ii) travel to their university to give them a three-hour verbal ("viva voce") examination. The English system is very odd that way, in that three or four years of doctoral research suddenly ends in a three-hour grilling with an academic who looks tired from travelling from elsewhere - for the express purpose of grilling you.
It is nice to be on the other side of the grilling, these days.
1 comment:
This haiku refers to a previous: Morning Lecture, in which only my shadow seemed to know the way to Tsinghua.
This visit, my shadow seemed a little faded - from time, from travelling the length of China. I was determined to keep my commitment of giving a lecture in the Department of Computer Science, which turned out to be followed by a lunch of such magnitude that my shadow was soon looking much stronger.
The image that makes the haiga is from another academic visit; it is a cheeky mix of image and haiku, because, as the academics among you may know, the photograph is not of Tsinghua, but of The Other Place.
I grew up in The Other Place, and so the traditional rivalry doesn't really work on me. That said, whenever I go to Cambridge on academic business, it does feel entirely alien. I no longer associate it with being "home".
This particular trip reminded me of my Tsinghua faded-shadow-trying-to-find-lecture experience. One of the oddities of being appointed a faculty member last year is that I now get e-mails from absolute gurus in my field (even though I am but a hopeless stripling) asking me to (i) read a student's 250-page thesis, and (ii) travel to their university to give them a three-hour verbal ("viva voce") examination. The English system is very odd that way, in that three or four years of doctoral research suddenly ends in a three-hour grilling with an academic who looks tired from travelling from elsewhere - for the express purpose of grilling you.
It is nice to be on the other side of the grilling, these days.
Toodlepip,
Hobbes
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