Spring Semester 2021: Knee Deep in Psych Courses + Translating a Novel!

Hello everyone!

I hope 2021 is serving you better than 2020. Like surely it can’t be worse than that, right?

I’ve honestly been having a good time and even though my spring semester started in mid-January it’s actually been fun? As much fun as zoom university can be. I’m not banging my head against the wall and crying in despair though, so that counts for something. Seriously though, so far my semester has been really exciting which is why I decided to show up with another edition in my University Journals series, just to chat with you all about my online semester 🙂 I mean the last edition was in freaking October so damn, it’s been a long time. Tighten your seat belts cause I have so much to tell you about!

Woman saying “Let’s chat, shall we?”

Spring Semester 2021: Knee Deep in Psych Course + Translating a Novel!

To begin with, I feel like I owe you all an explanation from the last post where I basically had an existential crisis about my major choice. If you didn’t read that post feel free to check it out here. Anyway, I finally decided that the anxiety was too much to take and after a careful consideration of multiple factors, I decided to drop my English major. Previously I had been planning on doing a double major in Psychology and English with a minor in Creative Writing and yes, it was quite a lot. But now I’m happily pursuing a single major and minor.

This semester I took up three psychology courses, a creative writing course as well as a co-curricular and wow, things have been interesting to say the least.

Social Psychology: a course where I wish we’d get to the interesting part soon

I actually really like this course. The professor is great, I have a lot of friends in this course, assignments aren’t overwhelming but also the course itself is a bit underwhelming. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy but I wish we were doing a bit more complicated and interesting stuff. Most of these concepts have already been covered in introductory courses and are self-explanatory so I’m often sleepy in class. I also blame it on the fact that the class takes place right after lunch…

Man sleeping with a book in front of him, awakens all of a sudden

Clinical Psychology: the dream course

I plan on becoming a counselling psychologist in the future so I was super excited to take this course and so far it hasn’t disappointed! I have the sweetest professor (I mean most psych profs are sweet but still) and such interesting course material. Sometimes a few of us stay past the class time just to listen to professor answering random questions. That’s how invested I am 🙂

Developmental Psychology: this is a mess and I’m being scarred for life

This might be the least favourite course I have this semester because the structure of the course is a mess. I mean sure our professor is pretty sweet but she doesn’t explain the concepts properly and often hurries past. Not to mention the amount of stuff we’re supposed to read and the assignments that we go through, it’s a bit stressful. But also, childbirth is fucking scary and I’ve seen the creepiest pictures of fetuses that make me want to bleach my eyes. Almost everyone in class has been scarred off childbirth at this point.

The Installation Art Co-curricular: I’m so done

Listen, the only reason I took up this course is because I’m required to take a co-curricular and I wasn’t able to get into any other course that I wanted. First off, I’m not too crazy about installation art and secondly, how do you expect to teach it to us, much less expect us to come up with two amazing installations in the span of 12 weeks??? Also this course occurs at 6pm on a Wednesday, after I’ve had three back to back courses which means I’m practically brain-dead in the class.

And saving the best for the last…

Translation Workshop: The one where I reignite my love for Hindi novels

This course is seriously unlike anything I’ve ever done. The aim is to translate 20,000 words of a short story, poetry or novel from any language to English. I don’t talk about this a lot but I actually used to love writing and reading in Hindi, my native language. But since it wasn’t mandatory after 10th class I lost touch. I searched high and low for a Hindi book that I would actually enjoy reading and translating and finalized Pachpan Khambhe Laal Deewarein which basically translates to Fifty-five Pillars Red Walls.

I am immensely enjoying reading in Hindi as well as the translating process. Sure it can be annoying sometimes, especially when I stumble upon idioms and words that have no English equivalent but I love the challenge. I keep going to my mother and grandmother for some translations that I have difficulty with because Google cannot be trusted at all. There are some hilarious moments too, like that time it took me 20 pages to realise ‘Bhauri‘ wasn’t the name of a dog but a woman, lol. Context matters!

Woman saying “so fun”

It’s such a unique process. I’m only on my first draft which will go through a couple more revisions later but I’m definitely going to read more books in my native language after this. I recently found out that my state library has reopened which means I can browse through the shelves for some Hindi books soon 🙂

What is up with you all? What have you been reading?

What is your favourite translated book?

Do you enjoy reading translated works?