Wednesday, July 27, 2011

What About the Academics?

From my recent posts it must appear that the Lauder summer immersion is all fun, games and travel, but we actually do have to study too!  So on that note, I'm going to use today's post to summarize the academics.

Over the last 2 months, we've averaged 3-5 hours of class on most days, which includes instruction as well as one-on-one sessions.  Overall, I definitely saw an improvement in my Hindi, but I also feel I'm quite a ways from the much desired "superior" level.  The ultimate goal over the 2 years at Wharton/Lauder is to improve our language skills up to "superior," which basically means that one can handle a wide variety of situations (including presentations, debates and role plays) with complete language fluency.  Now if by some miracle, I am actually able to pass off as "superior" by the end of the 1st year, then my summer project for next year will have more flexibility (i.e. I wouldn't necessarily have to come back to India next summer).  Superior or not, my goal was to improve as much as I could.

Aside from the language instruction, I found the first month was very light on graded assignments.  And then suddenly, about half way through we were hit with a presentation, debate and short speech all in the same week.  I presented my Wagah border experience (from my July 15th post).  For the debate, I had to role play the government view on the Lokpal bill (an anti-corruption bill) - much to my chagrin it's not a viewpoint I agree with and thus got killed in the debate.  And finally, my speech was about a recent corporate visit to Reliance Big Entertainment.

For the second month, we had a number of ungraded debates, presentations, grammar correction exercises and ad hoc stories we had to make up.  We had our final exam today, which consisted of a 5 minute speech, a written assignment and some grammar corrections.  All in all, I was happy that our classes were somewhat relaxed but a part of me thinks a little extra rigor would have helped me improve my language faster.  It's a difficult balance though since I'm sure I would have been complaining if the classes were any tougher!

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