Anyone doing MH114 English?

2ndchance

I am applying as a mature student for this course and would really love a copy of the timetable and reading list to see exactly what I'd be letting myselfvin for! I know they're available on moodle but I don't have access. If anyone could send me a copy it would really help prepare for interview also. Thanks in advance. Any other words of wisdom also would be great. Thanks

A Changer

Hi there! I've just got my first semester done in MH114, so I think I can help.

The difference between MH114 and doing English through Arts is that it's a Major/Minor degree from the beginning. Instead of doing two modules per subject in First Year, you do four modules in English and two in whatever subject you're minoring in per semester. The course may change going into next year, but this is what we did in the first semester:

The degree is split into the two modules that all the other English students are doing, EN152A/B, Poetry. This module splits the year group into two, and you make your choice at registration. The differences between them are slight, really only involving what lecturers are giving it and the case study. For EN152A, it was the Harlem Renaissance and for EN152B, it was a selection of Irish poets.

The other Arts-included module was EN150, Literary Criticism. You're split into twenty-ish-person groups where you take a single poem, William Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud", and analyse it from different perspectives, from New Criticism to Reader-Response, and have to discuss it amongst the group.

Then we hit the MH114-only modules. The MH114 group is pretty small, kept to about twenty, and you get to know each other pretty well. There are five mature students out of our twenty, and the ages range from seventeen to forty!

EN171 is History of Ideas. Each week, we look at a major thinker that brought new concepts and ideas about the nature of humanity and the world we inhabit. This starts off with Aristotle, moving through Machiavelli, Rousseau, Burke, Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin and more. The first lecture of the week is a discussion about the thinker done by the lecturer, and the second is a presentation done by a group in the class. We're split into groups at the beginning of the year, and have to work in our own time to give a verbal, Powerpoint presentation-assisted speech in front of the rest of the group about the ideas that we find interesting/important. These all get posted on Moodle later to assist in writing a 2,000 word essay based on different questions, which change every year, before ya ask for 'em! :P

EN172 is Writers & Themes 1, where a chosen member of the faculty gives a course on an aspect of English that greatly interests them. This can be entirely different every year, but for us, it was "Poetry and its Possibilities", where we explored, as a class discussion, the interpretation of meaning we gleaned from both content and form. This moved to creating our own poetry anthology of 12-14 poems, under wide-ranging criteria, all of which we had to reference from print versions. After that enormous endeavour, we had to write either a 2,500-word analysis, or recite three poems from memory in front of the group at a specified time and write a 1,000-word analysis. I feel tired even remembering having to do all that! My final document was over forty pages long! :P

Going into next semester, though, we where all the reading begins. For the English through Arts stuff, we could buy everything we need this year is a €100 pack at the beginning of the year, which included NUIM-created course readers, as well as

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Rudyard Kipling's Kim
James Joyce's Dubliners
Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I can't say anything about the Semester 2 modules yet, since I've yet to do them, but it'll be an analysis of those, as well as five stage dramas that are in the course readers. The MH114-only modules include another Writers and Themes, where we're looking at Modernist novellas:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (1912)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1900)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1915).

The other module is Creative Writing 1, looking at novel and short story-writing.

Going into next year and beyond, we'll have only one extra module per semester in second year, another unknown Writers and Themes and a poetry-based Creative Writing module, and there's no extra modules per semester in third year...though we need to write a dissertation, that the Arts English students don't. This can be a piece of literary criticism or a piece of creative writing, but they haven't told us anything about it yet and would probably look at us funny if we asked, since it's so far ahead of us!

Let me know if there's anything else you want to know, and good luck with becoming a part of the "English Elite"! (Yes, we were called that once!)

2ndchance

A Changer, thank you so much for taking the time to reply. It really helps to get some insider information on how the course runs. I've been talking to a mature student from the group on the boards also who gave me some great information too, so between you both I've a lot to be going on with. The only other thing I would really like to know now is what type of question/essay/format the mature student exam takes? I'm not sure if you are a school leaver or a mature student so you may not know, but as a mature student entry to MH114 is based on an exam then shortlist for interview and then depending on outcome an offer of a place or not. I plan on doing a lot of reading between now and then and showing that I've researched the course and know what's involved but if I could have some idea of what the written assessment involves I think I would relax more. Once again thank you so much for replying and hopefully I'll get to talk to you in person next year as a student! That's not to say I won't have more question before then!
Thanks a mill you really have been very helpful.

A Changer

Hi, sorry for the delayed reply, I was away all day yesterday.

I'm just a school-leaver, anyway, so I don't have any first-hand experience of the mature student exam. I was talking to some on the course that had, and they were saying it was not focused on any particular readings or knowledge of literature, but more a test of your ability to phrase answers to general questions. From my own understanding, they would only be searching for potential ability, not a refined talent, since the first semester was devoted to teaching us how to correctly answer essays, and we also have to sign up for essay-writing workshops in Semester 2 to continue this train of teaching.

That's probably not much help, but good luck in your admission!

2ndchance

Actually that makes sense and is preferable to thinking I need to have read most of the great works before even being interviewed! Went shopping today nag bought lots of reading material so now to get down to reading it. Thanks again for all your help A Changer.

ashmac23

hi guys, I am hoping to return to college this September as a mature student. I received a letter stating that I will have to sit two exams in three weeks. One for English and one for History. I am just wondering if you could let me know what might come up as I don't have a clue, thank you so much