6:30 – Wake up, get ready, have breakfast, and pack my bag. I live in South West London so it takes me just under an hour to get to campus by bus.
8:00 – Make tea to take to class and catch the bus to campus.
9:00 – First class: surrealism lecture.
10:00 – Get a hot drink from Chapters or the Arcade Café. (sometimes for free with the Moves+ app, where your steps are converted to points you can spend on King’s food). Find a place to study on campus in Bush house or the Maughan library and do the readings for my other modules later in the week. In the summer, I love to go to Victoria Embankment or Lincoln’s Inn Fields to read.
12:00 – Go into central London/Chinatown for lunch.
14:00 – Second class: surrealism seminar.
15:00 – Either stay in central London for an exhibition (there are so many great museums near Strand Campus and many of them are free, like the Courtauld Gallery and the National Gallery!) or head home.
My schedule
Like a lot of other Arts and Humanities degrees, the course has less contact time in comparison to degrees like medicine or law; I have scheduled teaching on three days a week in my second semester. Though it may seem like a lot of time off, especially as I tend to have at least an hour in-between my classes, Comparative Literature requires a lot of independent study time.
As an example, though one module may have only one lecture and one seminar weekly, on average I spend at least a couple of hours doing the seminar and lecture readings. This can vary from module to module, but it isn’t uncommon to study a different novel every week, so being able to organise my time efficiently to avoid falling behind is key!
My modules
This semester, I’m taking the compulsory dissertation module, Surrealism, Stage 4 French with King’s Language Centre, Testimony: The Holocaust and Rwanda and the Contemporary Irish Novel. The dissertation module isn’t scheduled on my timetable except for one workshop as its mostly independent study. Three of my seminars are 2 hours long so I only have one weekly lecture, so overall for this semester I’ll have one separate lecture and four seminars.
Thanks for reading and I hope this blog post has given you a better idea of what schedule you might have if you choose to study Comparative Literature at King’s!
For more information on the Comparative Literature BA, click here.