My experience learning English at the university

Nowadays, English is in everywhere. I consider myself as a part of one generation that grew up in an environment bombarded with English. In fact, most of the famous musicians sing in English, and almost every movie or T.V series that I usually watch are spoken in English as well. We have a lot of words and terms that we use daily without notice that they actually came from the English, like “suéter” which derivate from sweater. In this global Era, knowing English became a really helpful tool, especially in academics terms, where most of the information is just available in English.

In general, I believe that the University’s English program is good way to get along with this language. During the course is possible to improve English’s skills as listening, speaking, reading and specially writing. A really good aspect of the course is that the little number of students in each class, which gives the opportunity for practice “speaking” to every present student. In fact, the number of students affects directly the develop of speaking skills, for instance, during high school was almost impossible to practice “speaking” during the class due to the number of classmates, I mean, there were forty-five of us! Apart from this, another really good aspect of the course was that we learn new things, like phonetic, something that I found necessary and useful to improve my pronunciation.

What I personally didn’t like of the course was keeping a blog. In one hand I find it a very good way for developing writing skills, and also very easy to check and correct for the teacher. In the other hand, I usually found boring to write in the same format all the sessions. Other negative aspect to consider was the class schedule; I wouldn’t mind getting up earlier in the morning instead of staying until half past seven in the evening at the university!

Taking everything into account, I conclude that there were great advantages on doing this English course. I must admit that I wasn’t really motivated to take this class, but now that is almost finished, I can hardly find more disadvantages than those two that I already mention. Apart of improving my English, through reading people’s blogs the course gave me the opportunity to know better some of my classmates. Finally, as a suggestion, I believe the course needs some more dynamic activities, like playing “The weakest link”! I really enjoyed that class!

Challenges in Anthropology

Well, the students of anthropology national meeting was held last week at our faculty. The title of the meeting was: “Ruptures, experiences and projections”, so students from different points of the country met to know what has been done , what is been doing in all the different anthropology schools of Chile, in order to propose general perspectives about how us, as students of anthropology, believe the career should be project toward the next future.

In my opinion, the perspective of the students from others universities was really different from ours. I don’t want to comment their way of how to make anthropology, or compare it with the way from this university, because I think is not appropriate (at least not in this moment). I think one big challenge of the discipline is to generate an open and critical discussion among the different points of view of the anthropology, especially among different universities. In fact, studying Social Anthropology in Valdivia than in Santiago is complete different, not only because they are immersed in different realities, but also because there are differences in the academic program and methodological focus of each faculty.

I cannot tell about technological challenges of the discipline because I’m not familiar with the technical or technological display, like computational programs, used in anthropology.

One important challenge of the entire discipline, especially of social anthropology, is the little work demand from the society (maybe I should use the word market instead of society, but I’m not comfortable thinking that your job opportunities depends exclusively on the fluctuations of the economical market). A lot of students enrol the career thinking that they can make a real contribution to society studding anthropology, but when they face the “work world” they discover that maybe is not possible to do what they really want, because almost nobody gives money to do social researches, and if they do, is because there are some economical interest on it. In a similar way, in our country forensic anthropologist don’t get the enough acknowledgment from their work as a forensic scientist (a doctor) could get.

Is true that anthropology is quite a new discipline (at least in Chile), but I believe is time for the society to recognise this discipline can help to solve serious matters, like the Mapuche conflict, and several more.