Leicester Adventure: Crossing of the First Threshold, My Magical Mystery Tour

Saturday

My alarm clock decided on waking me at 6 am sharp. I had ordered it to do so; I wanted to be up at the same time as my mum and step-dad so I could oversee the final packing and catering procedure. It therefore sort of dismayed me that I heard the car doors slam shut as I was putting on my sweater, meaning that somehow they had managed to be up before me and managed to put nearly everything in the car, except for my winter coat and my umbrella. But then I remembered that this also meant that I would not have to worry about any of that, and I felt grateful. We left for Calais at 7 am, and I unfolded my favourite in-car items as we left Hellevoetsluis; the maps. We have no need for maps, as we have, like every other civilized family, a GPS device, but I have been taught to read maps when I was just a little girl and this has left me with a strange sense of joy whenever I get to pore over maps and figure out ways and destinations. Dawn did not properly happen until we were near Barendrecht, but that's okay because I prefer the maps of Belgium and England because I haven't been there nearly as often.

Maps also work nicely to cover up the mess I made of the back seat since I'd been put in control of the in-car catering and I just stuck everything back in the bag without looking.

We arrived in Calais more than an hour early, but I guess the whole matter of the Sussex maths teacher and his 15-year-old pupil have left the border agents a bit spooked because somehow the queues managed to move so slowly that we were just in time to get on our ferry.

The weather was so wondrously clear that even at Calais, you could see all the way to the cliffs of Dover.

This made the 22-mile-crossing seem lots shorter than it was – I spent nearly all of it outside, as if trying to reach out for the whiteness at the horizon to try and pull myself towards it. Funnily, all three of us left the ferry feeling a bit queasy, my step-dad because he just can't deal with rolling waves and my mum and me because we both felt that the correction of the boat – it has stabilizers, of course – didn't allow our balancing systems to work, thus upsetting us as though we were both landsick (I didn't actually know landsickness could be hereditary, but my mum and my brother also get sick after being on rolling waves rather than actually getting seasick at that time). 

But arriving at Dover was brilliant, seeing those white cliffs up close (I'd never seen them before, always crossing more northerly, to Hull or at one time even Newcastle). And I immediately got to realize what I've realized many times before but seem to always forget – England is bad puns galore. There was this one B&B or pub or something called The Chalk of the Town. Very punny. The only good thing (for entrepreneurs) about bad puns is that they're far more difficult to forget than good puns because good puns only make you chuckle instead of cringe.

We drove to Ashford, to a Tesco there, where I bought an electric kettle because my old one I'd left in Middelburg and I didn't want to buy one in the Netherlands because it would have the wrong plug. Then up to London, and via Cambridge because we wanted to avoid the M1. My step-dad and I had a bit of fun over saying 'pretentious elitist wankers' at the spires at the horizon.

A bit of a mix-up happened right after Cambridge, because we'd discussed the route a number of times and there never was any clarity on whether we'd go via Peterborough or Kettering. The GPS wanted to send us via Peterborough, but seeing as I was reading the map I saw that those roads were not as good as the ones via Kettering. It worked out fine in the end, as we ended up going via Kettering, driving into Leicester from the South-East, so via Oadby. Oadby is very English, very pretty. In fact, all of Leicestershire is the typical sort of English that you'd imagine – rolling green hills, rickety fences, cottages, small villages with pubs called 'The Wild Boar' or 'The Red Lion'. We drove through Leicester – something my step-dad didn't really like, to north Leicester to find a chip shop called The Codfather (puns galore!). I did not feel in the mood for fish & chips, because I'm not that fond of fish really, but they also had a good chicken&mushroom pie, so I had pie & chips instead. Finally, we were to end our day in a B&B just north of Leicester, but something had gone wrong there. The people of the B&B were very pleasant, but there'd been a mix-up in the reservation so they only had a double room left. I got to sleep in a big room with a genuinely massive bathroom in a side-of-the-road hotel just off the A6 instead, while my mum and step-dad took up the offer of the double room in the B&B. The B&B people apologized a million times, and really, stuff like this can happen and seeing as I was waiting for something to go wrong, I can live with this being the one thing that does so.

Sunday

Somehow, I'd managed to mess up the changing of the times on my phone and so it did not wake me up at 7am as I'd wanted it to. Instead, some nightmare that I forgot right after shook me awake at 7:22, so I rushed out into the hotel's breakfast area, worked down some toast with raspberry jam and some orange juice, and stuffed my laptop back in the bag – I'd hoped the hotel had wifi, but alas – and then flopped down back on the double bed to watch BBC's breakfast news.

Mum and Willem pretended to be room-service at 8:45, after which we drove through Leicester, back to Oadby, so we could pick up the key for my room. My arrival instructions had 9:30 on them, but we were there at 9:10. The people didn't care, I got my key.

The Mary Gee campus is quite pretty. Very green. The rooms themselves are fairly forgettable, as they are just the basics – a desk, a wardrobe, a bed and a night stand. And two bookshelves, which are just about able to hold the books I brought. It's green enough for squirrels to bounce about.

We unloaded the car and then set off for the nearby Asda superstore for some groceries – I needed to have drinks &c. - and then to Sainsbury's for some early lunch. Listening to Midlands English and comparing it to my own made me realise that RA English really has some very strong American influences. Drove back into Leicester to see the Uni campus, which is big but nice and, for reference, holds the middle between the massive Erasmus Uni Rotterdam campus and the miniature Roosevelt Academy campus, but leans towards EUR-size. Then back to Mary Gee, and my mum trying her best not to do an emotional goodbye.

So here I sit. Writing, feeling content. It's all worked out, hasn't it?

Leicester Adventure: Waiting to Cross the First Threshold

As I sit on my mum's flowery sofa, watching The Voice of Holland, repeatedly refusing a glass of wine, I come to realize that I am scared.

Not the sort of terrified, petrified, horrified kind of scared that nightmares and ghost stories will do to you, nor the anxiousness that some situations may do to you, but the sort of scared that more or less empties your mind and only allows you to wait until it's all over.

My step-dad and me tried fitting everything in the car earlier today; it all fit. Our planning is sound. I'm not nervous. I'm just... waiting. There is nothing I can do.

I also just read this one article on the website of The Guardian about how it takes, like, 15 years or so for scientists to find a proper research position in academia. I'm not a scientist and I'm not going to try and find a research position, but still I wonder how it'll all work out in my future. Sure, politics and the judiciary are nice alternatives, but when it all comes down to it, I'd like it best if I got to teach undergrad Criminology, or secondary school 'maatschappijleer'... I've got this no-longer-that-secret ambition somewhere to one day get to teach Roosevelt Academy's 'Crime and Law Enforcement' course because I think I'd be really good at that (but for now we'll leave teaching that course to prof. Ippel), but in the end it'll all come down to me having to take whatever job comes my way.

I'm not worried about that. I'm actually not worried at all at this point. I'm just... I'm waiting.

9 more hours. I think I'll try and get some sleep now.

Leicester Adventure: The Call to Adventure

If this adventure was anything like the Campbellian monomyth, I would currently be stuck somewhere between the Call to Adventure (first finding out about Leicester) and the Crossing of the First Treshold (going there this weekend), in a stage that keeps shifting from Refusal of the Call (my many, many anxieties) to Supernatural Aid (with people popping up who will be helpful along the way, such as mentors) and back.

I'm now at the point where I should pack my final belongings, as no real adventure can be undertaken without preparations. Even Indiana Jones is shown to take preparations in Raiders (assuming that popping a leather jacket, a whip and a revolver in a suitcase counts as preparation), and as I need much more stuff than Indy, I heed the advice everyone is giving me: pack well. But I find it hard to pack, as I have to distinguish between all my stuff (and I have so much of it, too... I should unclutter) and figure out what's worth bringing and what's not. Who knows what I'm going to need a year from now? It's not even that I attach any material value to my belongings, I just care about my books and my laptop, it's just that some things are so useful. Also, how is one supposed to fit a year's worth of stuff in as few boxes as fit in a medium sized sedan? Or to stuff an entire wardrobe in a suitcase? My father just came up to my room as I was attempting to close my suitcase (by going all Hollywood and sitting on top of it while trying to zip it shut) and complained that I was destroying my suitcase like that and why wasn't I using a bigger one? If I read Leicester's list of what to bring - toiletries (check), crockery (check), dressing gown (check), cutlery (check), towels (check), cooking utensils (check), desk lamp (non-check - haven't decided yet on which one to bring, they're all ugly) - I wonder why they haven't listed the stuff that takes the most space to move, like clothes. It's impossible for me to decide what parts of my wardrobe to bring (and my wardrobe isn't that extensive to begin with) and then I'm still supposed to fit everything in a few boxes? Packing is hell.

Oh, by the way, here's a video of my location: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78tJLrQcv0A

And while packing, there's the matter of anxiety. Packing and preparations allow for just enough inspiration for such gloomy doom but require not enough attention to distract me. So I put on some Nat King Cole or Paul McCartney or Dean Martin and work like that. I had something of an email virus over the weekend, and I've tried resolving it - ran three different antivirus programs - so I hope that matter's settled now too, but it did lead to a whole new set of anxieties, of the social kind - 'oh, those people that received emails from my account from the virus, what are they to think of me?!' - and then, as good anxieties ought to, I could not settle them with reasonable suggestions. So I slept instead, and I think I may have settled the anxieties too.

The rest of this week will also consist of prep work, like de-registering from the municipality. And I'm counting down the days until I reach that next big part of my adventure, the Crossing of the First Threshold, where I get to jump out into the Unknown and experience my Adventure for real. Four days and a half.

But first, I have to finish packing. I wonder whether to bring my pretty copy of Shakespeare...

About Me: And after?

Oooooh, that dreaded question. "So, what are you going to do after this?"

Well, I've got four plans.

A) I will apply for PhD programme 1: the doctorate in cultural and global criminology (dcgc), which is part of the Erasmus Mundus programme and which will allow me to do time (hihi, like a prison, get it? Sorry.) in Kent, Utrecht and Hamburg (and maybe Budapest). Deadline: 8 January 2013. http://www.dcgc.eu/

B) I will apply for DPhil programme 1/2 (depends on whether you count DPhil as PhD, because it is in fact just a PhD with a different order of abbreviations): which is at Oxford... I would love to have Federico Varese as a supervisor because I loved Mafias on the Move. And also, Oxford. Deadline: January 18 2013.

C) I will apply for PhD programme 2/3: this is one I'll have to arrange all by myself. I could stay in Leicester and try to work with Yvonne Jewkes, author of Media and Crime, and maybe try to get a second supervisor from another Uni; I'm dying to work with Christiana Gregoriou, because of Language, Ideology and Identity in Serial Killer Narratives, but I'm not sure if such a construction would work out (and whether they'll be interested in supervising my PhD). It would be epic, though, if it would work out.

D) I will apply for a Rijkstraineeship, which is a 2-year government programme where you get to work at the ministry that best matches your interests. Also an interesting option for after a PhD. http://www.werkenvoornederland.nl/wat-is-het-rijk/beroepsgroepen/?adm_pin=01770

After that? Well, considering that if I get to go into A/B/C and afterwards D, I'll have filled the next 5-7 years of my life, I think that for now I get to say that I've planned enough. Except, of course, that I haven't. But everything afterwards isn't set in stone.

Yet.

Leicester Adventure: Doubts

You can't help but to sometimes doubt whether you've made the right decision.

One of my most persistent doubts is whether I'm actually good enough to be (and remain) in academia... being in academia, after all, does mean that every day you're surrounded with brilliant minds with brilliant ideas and with brilliant papers published in brilliant journals. But in those moments, I'd do well to think of what a senior professor once told me; "you don't have to be the smartest to cut it in academia, you just have to be really interested in something".

Another serious doubt is whether I'll get a job once I'm done. I'm capable of doing loads of stuff, I know that - if anything, I can go back to my old job of being a court clerk, I could live off such a salary - but it's the doubt of whether I'll find anything that can keep my interest for forty years. I do want to be an instructor, after all. But I don't have to find my dream job straight out of grad school - I should just try to get any job in my field (which ranges from pure law enforcement to government to academia, after all) and then as soon as a job closer to my dream opens up, move into that. I'll worry about my retirement fund being scattered and all over the place later - I'll have study debts to clear up first, then.

Currently I also wonder whether I'll fit in with the English locals. I don't mean townies, though I'm sure the people of Leicester are wonderful, but I mean with the English students. But while in Oxford, Kristy assured me that I seemed so well at ease there, and more people have told me that England is a place I'll like even for extended periods of time. Well. We'll see, won't we?

Tips: Finances

First, a quick statement: I am not going to go into my personal financial situation here (because my savings and debts are just not interesting). Just a bit of a warning about finances if you're planning to study abroad as well (I somehow hope that aside from friends reading this blog to find out how I'm doing, students looking for tips on studying abroad may find this blog as well - I am writing for an audience, in short, even though it is imaginary, and for this specific post the audience consists of prospective students-abroad).

Studying in the UK is expensive if you're used to Dutch university costs. My tuition fees for one year are 4795 pounds, or anywhere ranging from 6000-6500 euros (depending on exchange rates), and I'm going to live on campus because that's easiest for now - as soon as my contract ends, I'm going to look for non-university owned living, which is less expensive but did not have the guarantees of OK maintenance (although Universities aren't that great at that, either, but they're far more reasonable as a landlord to have a feud with), convenient locations, and a guaranteed room to begin with. But that's also over 3200 pounds for a 39 week contract (in my case, and I've got the cheapest contract available for Leicester).

Sure, you're eligible for tuition credit on top of your basic study finance and student loan (which I do recommend you take, especially for a one-year study abroad - you don't want to worry about finances this year and you'll probably make it back fairly easily once you go out into the working world), but it's still going to be hellishly expensive.

These basic fees I just outlined? They're just the fees you can be sure you'll have to pay - there's going to be soooo many more variable fees, like for books, or food (I don't recommend living on noodles and tea alone, because though a very effective weight-loss diet, eventually your body will shut down and you won't be able to concentrate), or, being a student, drinks. You'll want to make some trips, too, like to conferences - especially when you're a postgrad - and more stuff that'll enhance your study. That budget plan everyone encourages you to make? Make it, get your known fees covered, and then toss it aside because for everything else it's not going to work.

So be warned. It's not that difficult to get these fees covered, but you (or your parents) will have to go into debt (even if just with DUO, which we all know doesn't really count) and it's always going to turn out to be more expensive than you'd hoped. But it'll be worth it, surely.

How long my Adventure has lasted (formerly known as The Countdown)

Leicester Adventure: Preparations

Bureaucratic countries make it hell to change any sort of living situation, and moving countries is such a massive change that they seem utterly unable to cope with it. This means having to make loads of phone calls, the least pleasant/most annoying ones to Government organizations.

My issues of the day have to do with my subsidies. Being a poor student in a country with an extensive social system allows me to have loads of subsidies, and since I've grown used to them I'd love to take them all with me when I go abroad.

This morning, I called the organization that deals with study finance, the IB-Groep (though they're now called DUO - Dienst Uitvoering Onderwijs), and asked them about my change of address. I got to talk to a very pleasant young man, who had studied English Literature and Culture and who wished me loads of fun. Changing your info with DUO isn't that hard, they're used to students going abroad. Basically, at least three months in advance you have to go to the website, download the "aanvraag buitenland" form and fill this out. It asks for your address abroad, but few already know that at that point of course, so you're allowed to leave it blank. I did. It's a fairly simple procedure, because - well, this is routine for them. But be on time. Anyway, I called them today because I've known my address for a while now and I figured now's the time to change it. I asked the pleasant young man whether I had to do so via the internet, and he confirmed that I had to, and basically advised me to wait until I had ended my registration with the municipality (uitschrijven GBA) and then manually change my address because DUO does not have any access to whatever British files there are concerning addresses. He also advised me to fill out a form for authorization - meaning that he's advising me to authorize my father (or anyone, but I'm going to authorize my father, I think) to act on my behalf in dealing with DUO if something happens to me. Good advice, helpful, easy.

Then I called the Tax Service, and that was far less pleasant, though my waiting time was only a third of what it was for DUO. See, when you study in Britain for more than six months, you're eligible for registration and insurance with the NHS, and so I figured that I'd cancel my Dutch health insurance and end my health insurance subsidy. Stoopid to make such assumptions, but reasonably stoopid, not very badly. Right, so my health insurer returned my request for cancellation last week, saying that since I was going to study, but not work, abroad, I was still obliged (cos in the Netherlands you're obliged to have health insurance) to keep my insurance. Well, fuck. So I called the Tax Service asking whether I still had any right to my insurance subsidy. At first, I talked to a grumpy lady who needed me to tell my story three times, then had to transfer me to a colleague, who also had to transfer me. Honestly, this can't be such an outlandish question, can it? Anyway, the third person was able to help me - basically she told me that yes, I still have that right and that as soon as I have moved, I am to fill out a new request for my subsidy. Straightforward answer, half helpful, but too grumpy and annoyed. Sorry that I was stupid enough to make assumptions, guys, I didn't mean to ruin your day or anything...

Other things: all other insurances. Best to keep your Dutch post address, because then you can have your parents deal with them. They're not going to send you much mail anyway, and besides, you can arrange pretty much everything via the internet anyway. I only have my travel insurance left, which costs me a whopping 2.50 euros a month, so I'm not going to be bothered with that.

Phone: I have a subscription and a number that most people know. What I'm going to do is buy a top-up Sim and transfer my number. Hema lets me do this for cheap - as in, the Sim is cheap, the number transfer free. Put this new Sim in my phone. In this way, I'll keep my Dutch phone number for people who don't have my UK number and so I can still use it whenever I'm in the Netherlands. Once I'm across the channel, I'm going to get a UK subscription (or maybe even only a top-up, too) and a UK phone.

My registration with the social housing company: Since the age of 19, I've been registered with the local social housing company for when I'll return to the Netherlands and can't get a student room. It's been maintained through all my moves, and I want it to be maintained over next year too. I'll visit them tomorrow and report then on how it went.

Others: Yes, geez. I'm going to keep my registration with my GP and dentist here, because dentist's appointments can easily be cancelled and the GP is always useful in case I get sick in the Netherlands. I'm going to hand in my library card this week when I hand in my overdue books and... no, that's all I have to take care of, or at least, that I'm aware of having to take care of at this point in time. Will inform in due course if something else pops up.

UPDATE: My father was bored so he decided on taking me to hand in my overdue library books and drop by Hema for my Sim.
The library was great; the lady offered to write me a note so I could continue my subscription with another Dutch library for the time I had left on my old subscription (which means that I'd be able to subscribe with another library for free until May 2013). I told her I would be moving to England; she then proceeded to offer me to transfer my subscription to my father, so he could have a library subscription until May 2013 for free. He didn't have a subscription yet, and seeing as his girlfriend lives where there's another branch of this library cooperation (there's twelve libraries in it), he can even use it to allow his girlfriend and her kids to borrow books. He's happy, my subscription is done and the library is happy too. Win-win.
Hema didn't have the type of Sim I wanted, so I'll drop by another one tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: I cycled to Brielle this morning to deal with my social housing registration. The lady in there acknowledged that it would be a pity if I lost my 2.5-year registration (because you get priority based on how long you have been registered) and informed me that as long as I didn't move within the Netherlands, I would keep that old registration, because I would officially still qualify as residency-seeker in the Netherlands. So as long as I stay a Dutch citizen but live abroad, I can let this registration run on until I return and need a place, and then my registration will be long enough to put me in the top 5 for any place I might want. She also informed me that I will have to change my address online as soon as I've moved. Helpful, easy, done.
Hema Brielle also did not have a Sim. Is this then the thing that will go wrong?

UPDATE 3: Just sent a notification to Sanquin, the blood donation organization, that I will not be available for donations for the coming year. Unfortunately though, they managed to keep sending me donation requests for my old donation location (before I moved in with my dad) instead of the local one, so I am not entirely sure they will manage this completely, but they did manage to properly change my address when I requested they'd do so, so we'll see. Either way, I informed them...

Leicester Adventure: Saying Goodbye

Today I traveled north to see a Merel's new student room. This is part of my 'goodbye tour'. I feel like a rock star. Merel does a marvelously uncomplicated version of 'bye'.

But seriously, I hate saying goodbye. It always makes me teary and sad and everything, so I just try to avoid it. My favourite is just waving, saying 'see you next year!' and then parting ways. Far easier. Everyone's telling me that I'll stay across the channel and is behaving accordingly. Please don't. Saying bye is enough.

This is my planning for saying good bye to other people:

On Friday I will try and see my grandparents on my mum's side, and pay a visit to my grandparents-on-my-father's-side's graves, because those are the two goodbyes I feel I really have to do. On Saturday and Sunday I will go north to see Anouk. Then, a few days of packing, and then on Wednesday doing goodbye-drinks with Ma-ike. The level of emotion involved is going to depend on a number of factors.

The most difficult one is going to be next week Friday, when I will tell my father goodbye. Living with him this summer has made me realise that I am so much more like him than I thought, and it seems all the difficulties of my teenage years have been resolved. Dad gets pretty emotional with these things, but my brother and I have installed Skype for him and he's fairly OK with MSN.

My mum and stepdad love England, so they've volunteered to drive me and my belongings to Leicester. My mum tried to get some days off work, because she'd have liked to do a tiny bit of Leicester-exploring with me (and that week is also her and my stepdad's fifth anniversary, so everything would've been nicely coincidental had her taking off worked out), but they'll leave me with my belongings on Sunday. Mum and my stepdad don't do emotional goodbyes, so that'll be a good one. Also, they're good with computers.

It shouldn't be emotional, at all. I mean, pretty much everyone's vowed to visit me at least once, so then it's less than a year that I won't see them, and if there's Facebook and Skype and I have a Twitter and this blog and everything - there's no reason to really miss me, I'm just an hour's flying away. It's only for a year.

Except that it isn't. I think that in the end, I'll be the most emotional of all, because I am beginning to realize that what they're saying is right - it's highly likely that I'll stay, at least for more than this year, and I will miss the people that I have come to love so dearly. Oh well. Still only an hour's flying away.

UPDATE: How can I NOT have referenced Shakespeare and gone all "parting is such sweet sorrow" ? Except that this isn't sweet, and I'm going to slap anyone (except for Ma-ike, because I've had to promise her that she's not getting on my nerves by making a big fuss over this) who makes it seem like it's a sorrow.

About Me: Why Leicester?

The other day I received a formal message from the University of Leicester's Accomodation Services people that I am to arrive in Leicester on Sunday, September 30. Since receiving this, I have been mentally preparing myself. But why on earth did I choose Leicester in the first place? It's not in the top 100 of universities according to the most recent QS ranking (2012/2013) NOR Times Higher Education ranking (2011/2012); in fact, Leicester is almost embarrassingly proud of having risen from 195 to 185 in QS, and is 197 in THE. For comparison, Utrecht (of which Roosevelt Academy is a part) is respectively 85 and 68. Leicester is a member of the 1994 Group, but not of the way more influential Russell Group, which contains elite places like Oxford and Cambridge and indeed, most of the UK universities most attended by RA alumni. I'm not one to go for the standard choices when it comes to picking out schools - second of my elementary school EVER to attend the Helinium secondary school afterwards, and first of the Helinium to attend RA - but my choice seems fairly extraordinary even to my standards.

The history of my attempts to go and study abroad is fairly straightforward, but long and a bit sad at the beginning. I guess in a way it starts at a sleepover at 17, when three friends and I discussed our futures - I had my mind dead set on Roosevelt Academy, though Tilburg (never Rotterdam or Leiden - everyone was going there) was a back-up option, and I confided in them that I really would like to study at Cambridge if I was good enough - but I didn't think I was, so I never bothered.

When February 2012 rolled around, it hit me that I really did ought to get started on my applications for my master's programmes - I had drifted off into a slumber and suddenly people started talking about the statuses of their applications, which did wake me up but a little too late for my own good, like finally waking up after pressing 'snooze' four times. I scrambled to get myself together, saw that Oxford's Criminology deadline had already passed - but I didn't really want to go to Oxford back then anyway - and that Cambridge's was open until March 1. I sent in a crappy application, though I did get a letter of recommendation from Roosevelt Academy's interim dean, because the lower limit was a 3.8 GPA and if I got all As that semester (interesting bit of arguing on my side, there, too, that this was a possible feat for me) my final GPA would be 3.77 and really, that 0.03 difference and my extracurriculars (which are not nearly as impressive as I made them sound) should still get me that letter (I can be persuasive, but only when I really need to be). And then I waited, because I figured that if I didn't get in I'd go to a Dutch university and be done there. All in all, I thought I had it all figured out.

When the rejection came halfway through April, I was devastated for a night (a state of mind that yes, does include Domino's pizza, chocolate mousse and lots of cheap white wine), pulled myself together the morning after, thought of what to do next, and thought of this one book that I'd bought the month before.

See, the month before Kristy and I had attended a conference on a topic in a field almost completely unrelated to Criminology, but still one of my interests (and Kristy's field entirely) - we'd gone to Oxford to listen to academics speak about science and literature (because to literature and linguistics scholars, psychology and psycho-analysis are apparently also sciences, like cognitive science). Being the book-lovers that we are, Kristy and I scoped out Blackwell's almost immediately upon arriving (picking out the nearest bookshop as soon as possible is an activity we inadvertently repeated in Malta, though in no way is that Maltese bookshop allowed to compare itself to Blackwell's), and I chanced upon not one book, but an entire shelf dedicated to books on crime and media alone. I was a happy woman (actually, I experienced a sort of sense of relief not unlike what I felt when I finally saw Tutankhamun's death mask after gazing at pictures for over a decade), especially since I had been searching for a justification to being interested in law, criminology and stylistics simultaneously for over a year, and vowed that if I had enough pounds left by the end of our three-day-stay, I'd buy the book that appealed to me most. I did have just enough pounds left (though I think I would have been capable of purchasing the entire shelf had I not been scared into self-control by RyanAir's carry-on weight restrictions) and bought the book.

So on that dreadful April morning I picked up this book to see who had written it, for I remembered that it was a professor of Criminology somewhere in the UK. What had devastated me the night before was not just being rejected by the university that I had had a university crush (you know, being infatuated with the university itself) on since I first visited the town on a school trip at 14, but also losing the opportunity of going abroad, and the realization that I really was done with the Netherlands. So I panic-applied to three other UK universities that had Criminology/Criminal Justice programmes, and then finally turned to the author of this book, and saw that she taught at the University of Leicester when that book was published. I went to the website, saw she still taught there, saw that they had one of the few actual Departments of Criminology in all of the UK (and even North-West Europe, for in the Netherlands it's often part of the Department of Law, and it's not much different in Belgium and Germany) and that they offered, hold on, not just an Optional Module in Crime and Media (YES!) but also in Transnational Policing (Organized Crime, my other obsession!), Psychology of Evil (How can I not take anything named like that?) and a number of other things that sounded so... ME. I wrote the best application letter I have ever written and will ever write in my life (because applying because of one specific feature that makes you giddy and enthusiastic like a five-year-old in a field that leaves you obsessed like a sixteen-year-old tends to do that), pestered RA's new dean for a letter of recommendation and told my law professor I needed one, like, now. I got in.

Am I still sad about Cambridge's rejection? No. I am angry, though. But angry is good - I was arrogantly annoyed with Leicester for demanding that I take a TOEFL and then I scored really well despite being hungover, tired and despite being done with the test in what seems to be a record time because I wanted to get back to summer school in Middelburg, just to prove to Leicester that I found this demand ridiculous - so I hope this anger can fuel my motivation to prove to Cambridge that they were gravely off in rejecting me.
Am I at peace with my situation? Yes. I'm not sure if I would have been happy at Cambridge, and for now I don't know yet whether I'll be happy at the University of Leicester, but at least the programme seems more tailored to fit my personal obsessions. Leicester is, in a way, my second first choice, and once the RA alumni survey comes my way, I'll definitely be filling it out to say that I did get into my first choice master's programme.