To become a Master

I have always admired Master Jan Hus’s devotion to truth, Master Eckhart’s mysticism and Master Yoda’s fighting skills. Eventually I realised that these great people (or, more precisely, humanoids) have something in common. It is their Masters degree. So, I decided to study Masters at Cambridge to follow their footsteps. May the Force be with me.

The step from undergraduate to postgraduate studies is a small step for a man but a giant leap for his life. Everything becomes less transparent. Lifestyle becomes simpler due to the disappearance of daily studying duties, such as lectures, regular essays and weekly supervisions. At the same time, however, it becomes more complicated due to omnipresent uncertainty. You gain much more responsibility and you begin to have to look after everything yourself. You become overwhelmed by tones of information coming from everywhere, often delivering contradictory messages. A few weeks ago, my supervisor told me: ‘To become a good philosopher, you need to read a few articles a day.’ Ok, I thought, that’s not exactly easy, but he knows what he’s saying. Today, however, when I asked the same supervisor what to read in the next week, he replied: ‘Nothing. Just think carefully about your arguments.’

I often miss someone to turn to. In the past, when I didn’t understand some problem say in philosophy of mind, I was able to simply ask a friend sitting in the same room and I had a good chance that he had just attempted the same problem and he would be able to help me with it. Nowadays, when I can’t get my head around something in my research in philosophy of mind, and I turn to a friend for help, he is normally only able to help me with something completely unrelated which is the object of his own research. In most cases, it is related to ethics or politics.

Entering postgraduate studies could unexpectedly take you from the comfortable student’s seat to the teacher’s desk. When I accepted the offer to teach logic to first-year student, I ignored the fact that I hadn’t practiced logic for years. I did not realise how much effort it would be to refresh my memory. Entering the classroom. ‘Hello freshers, my name is Adam and I’m your tutor.’ [In reality: I am Adam, I am just a tiny bit older than you and just now I’m feeling like Beethoven at a rock concert.] ‘I am going to teach you logic, which I know everything about.’ [I am going to try to explain to you the stuff I was studying from the textbook last night.] ‘Today, we are going to start with problem number 3, which was difficult and everyone made a mistake in it.’ [Including myself, when I was trying to solve it.] And so on. However, I do really like teaching and I am grateful for this experience.


Another challenge I am facing this year is that for the first time I am living in a private house with a couple of friends, which basically means that we need to deal with all the cleaning and cooking the college used to sort out for us. However, many things have not changed at all, which was one of the reasons why I decided to stay in Cambridge. Cambridge is still pleasing the eye with the same ancient centre, meadows in the surroundings, river full of boats, Saturday market and Christmas decoration. I still play for the same tennis team and attend the same cultural events. So life is not that different after all.

 

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