Dissertation, wedding, a prince and moving out

The second semester of my Master’s programme has gone by really quickly, perhaps also because it was so full of different events ranging from a wedding, exams to moving out of London.

My primary focus was expectedly on my academic work: finishing up all my essays and revising for exams. The exams were relatively fine in the end, however, I’ll have to wait another two months to know the results. Compared to my classmates, who seems to be quite stressed because of the exams, I have had two comparative advantages. First, I already knew the format of English exams, which were quite new for many international students that studied their previous degrees in other countries, and second I have been lucky enough to have chosen courses which were evaluated by essays, which I finished before the exam period.

The only task left from this semester to be finished over the summer is my dissertation, which I am writing on a comparison of environment of social entrepreneurship (legal definitions and state support) in the UK and the Czech Republic. The sector I chose is construction and housing services. I chose it because i tis both untypical for social entrepreneurship and also because I wanted to research how social enterprises react to the present housing crises in Czech and British cities. Since I chose qualitative methods of data collection, I am doing twenty interviews with representatives of the social enterprises, support organizations and governmental bodies. It was rather difficult to get people who would be willing to do the interviews with me, however after persistent spamming and calling of reception desks I got to speak to those who were willing to help, so I am already finished with all the English interviews and half finished with the Czech ones.

Student life is never composed of studying only, there are also lots of cultural events along academic experiences. One of mine was an invitation to a wedding in Manchester of my friend Maria, whom I know from my Bachelor’s studies in Exeter. The wedding was indeed very nice. After the ceremony in a church we all boarded a rented red double decker which transported us to a steam train, in which we sang and ate and then the wedding progressed in Manchester city hall with a dinner and dancing. This wedding between a Russian woman and an Irish man symbolized how cosmopolitan the environment of British universities is. Maria’s nine years old nephew toasted to the young couple with these words: „To the health of all English citizens “, which made everyone laugh, as the groom’s family was Irish, bride’s was Russian and the guests came from Greece, Turkey, Czech Republic and other countries, all apart England…

I have had the chance to participate at an extremely interesting event this May, where I met a member of the British royal family, without even knowing that the event would be so important before I went there. In the fever of revising for exams I read the propositions of this event where I was invited by the Duke of Edinburg’s Czech National Office only very briefly. In the morning, I even considered not going there, as I was getting ready for an exam that would follow in the afternoon, however in the end I decide to go but to not fuss about it too much. As part of not wasting too much time on preparations I took one of my ordinary dresses (which in the end proved to be much shorter than it ideally should be according to the protocol of the event) and set off to find the venue in Westminster. Even during the very first moments it became apparent to me that this event was more serious than I anticipated. During the morning reception, someone gently repositioned my to face the correct side of the room, discreetly telling me how to greet His Royal Highness. Whilst I became quite nervous at this moment, in the end I was glad to be at this workshop about Alumni Clubs of the DofE Award, where Prince Edward spoke and discussed the participant’s experiences from their countries. It was an honour to represent our Czech Club in front of other AC representatives and the Prince.

Although I am still studying, since I am writing my dissertation until September, I have already finished the London part of my studies in June, when me and my flat mate Kristyna moved out of London. As usual, we packed all our belongings into cardboard boxes (when I moved to London, there was one, when I moved out, there were two…) and we sent them home. As it usually happens, not all stuff fitted in the given space, and so we had to make some painful decisions about what to take and what to leave behind for the next tenants who moved in on the day we left. We have left them quite a lot of things. Only during our flight to Prague, when we suddenly felt the melancholy of terminating a very pleasant period of our lives, we came up with a way to entertain ourselves: we started to imagine, what impression the things we left behind must have left on the new tenants and what they could be now thinking about Czech people in general. Our cupboards and fridge suggest that Czech people consume mostly mustard with flour, because there was 5 half eaten mustards left from when I tried to buy the one that would taste correct and there was a couple of kilos of flour, because all our Czech visitors had to bring us a bag, so that we could bake Czech cakes from the special flour. Twenty drinking glasses could perhaps indicate that Czechs like to make large drinking parties where they celebrate their mustard diets. Seven pairs of bedsheets with no duvets left behind perhaps showed that we were always warm and I don’t even dare to write here the impressions created by complete absence of any toilet paper in the whole flat… Thanks to this and similar entertaining thoughts we managed to overcome sadness and we finally realised that this time is indeed exciting, as we are standing on the edge of a new life era.

Although I don’t want to dwell into any deed reflexions of my studies here, as that could make me melancholic again, I would like to thank the Kellner Family Foundation again, for enabling me to study my Master’s degree at the LSE and my previous studies as well. It was fantastic five years of my life during which I learned a lot, met many greatly interesting people and visited numerous beautiful places. I am sincerely thankful.

 

 

 

Diplomka, svatba, princ a stěhování
Diplomka, svatba, princ a stěhování

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