期刊名称:Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society
电子版ISSN:2572-9861
出版年度:2019
卷号:2
期号:1
页码:1-7
DOI:10.1080/25729861.2019.1558806
语种:English
出版社:Taylor & Francis Group
摘要:Let me tell you a story. A story about language. More precisely, about the proper, or even soph-isticated, use of English. When I arrived in Cambridge, for my PhD, back in 2006, the biggest fear– a shared feeling for foreign graduate students, I guess – was to be unable to write a doctoraldissertation. I had already written a decent MA thesis while I was in New York, on material her-meneutics and political science. A thesis that, it is fair to say, was made up of term papers that Ihad envisioned, from the beginning, as chapters of a future thesis. The PhD thesis was,however, a different issue for three reasons. First, as you may know, there are no graduatecourses to take while you are doing your PhD in the United Kingdom. The PhD is an indepen-dent study during which you work under the supervision of a member of one academic depart-ment – in my case, the Sociology Department. Second, I had not been in the United Kingdomever by the moment I arrived for my PhD. Of course, I had heard about Cambridge – both thecity and the university – and fishandchips. And, because of my interest in history, I had also readprofusely about British history, especially the modern period. Third, I had not come aftergetting degrees from Oxford or Princeton. Neither were my parents a count or a baroness. Iwas, under any circumstances, an outsider. On top of these reasons, I have never felt confidentwith my use of English. I studied English as Second Language (ESL) during high school, and Itook an intensive, one-year course before taking the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)and the TOEFL exam to go to New York.