“You’re lucky if you are here!”
First year student Anna Zheltoukhova tells about her King's College London exchange experience.
Six first year students of the Programme “Comparative Politics of Eurasia” caught an opportunity to take part in the exchange programme to go to London to our King’s College London partners this summer. We have already posted the Guilherme Costa Gomes’s report and now we share Anna Zheltoukhova’s impressions with you.
«“London is the capital of Great Britain” – this is the most famous sentence of English textbooks published in Russia. This year London turned out to be much more than just UK capital, a tourist site with my favorite Lucky Charms crisps and huge portions of English breakfast for me. It is at this research internship in King’s College of London (KCL), when we the students of the programme “Comparative Politics of Eurasia” got a chance of not only to gain access to an enormous amount of articles and books hard (literary impossible) to find on the Internet, but also to become acquainted with the professors and students concerned with our theses’ topics.
The mentors from the Russian Institute were appointed to us from the very beginning, and they encouraged us to look at our research in a different way. In addition, one of the host professors here, Samuel Green, gave us a presentation of KCL students’ researches to give us an opportunity to be inspired with new ideas. By no means, such a conference helped us to broaden our knowledge in our research sphere and go into further details.
The library where our team’s working days pass works 24/7 to create all the necessary conditions for study: plenty of working seats, special discussion rooms, the articles base on the Internet and the published materials access turned out to be a huge motivation for studying all the day long. For example, one can lend a book to study it at home at one’s one pace – the thing I seldom encountered in the Russian libraries, at least in Saint Petersburg.
One should not forget to relax though. For the library and the university are located in the very center of London, we have a chance to visit the renowned museums (for free, almost or totally), to have a walk alongside Themes or have a lunch in a park. One can make a visit to a town nearby on the weekend: for example, to Brighton with its access to the sea, or to inspiring and historical York with the wonderful little shops where they sell fudge of the entire supplements one can imagine!
I still cannot believe we have caught a chance to dive the research atmosphere in one of the best universities of the country and to spend this time in an exciting city with tremendous culture life. After a month in London, I can freely say: “You’re lucky if you are here!”»