Semester Abroad Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone in Supervision

Semester Abroad - University of Cambridge: Pembroke College

Throughout college, I’ve always felt at ease in classroom settings, often due to the fact that Penn’s classes tend to be larger, which reduces the chances of being cold-called by your professor. Even recitation sections, which are smaller, discussion-oriented sessions used to complement the larger lecture, still contain 18-25 students. In light of this, the supervision system at the University of Cambridge offered a unique and initially, quite intimidating, opportunity to step out of my academic comfort zone.

Cambridge’s supervision system combines lecture-based learning with intense, individualized academic sessions. That is, in my experience at Cambridge, I would go to lecture the first couple days of the week and spend the rest of my time preparing for supervision. The general format of a supervision consists of a small-group session, typically ranging between 1-3 students, with a supervisor who is an academic (either a professor or high-level PhD student in the field). For my political science courses, I typically had to write an essay on the week’s assigned readings in preparation for supervision. In supervision, we would normally discuss the relevant content from the readings, which felt quite similar to the recitation set-up back at Penn.

However, the overall tenure of supervision as well as the intensity and depth of discussion surprised me. In my first term course, “International Conflict, Order and Justice,” I was paired with two other American students for supervision with a distinguished professor in the Human Social and Political Sciences department. Stepping into his office, it was everything that I imagined a British professor’s study would look like. Hundreds of books filled the room—they were piled in precarious stacks on his bookshelves, side tables, and even on the floor. Instead of traditional desks, we sat in overstuffed armchairs. Even my professor fulfilled my quintessential British expectations as embodied by his posh accent and tweed jacket with elbow patches. In many supervisions, we would discuss our essays, and the professor would quite explicitly target specific parts of our argument and push us to defend it. This was truly something new for me. Although I had received feedback on essays in the past, the comments were typically written and were never this personally tailored. Even more surprising was the complete ease with which he discussed our essays quite openly in front of our peers.

In my second term course, “The Modern State and Its Alternatives,” my supervisor was rather different—he was a fifth year, American PhD student writing a dissertation in Political Science. Although we were only slated for an hour to discuss my weekly essay and the week’s readings, our conversations usually ran for upwards of two hours. We would simply get wrapped up in discussing a wide range of issues faced by contemporary democracies, which would often transform into broader, philosophical conversations. I had never been subjected to such rigorous intellectual conversations before, so initially, I found the experience quite daunting. But as the weeks went by, I grew more and more comfortable developing an argument on the spot and eventually learned how to account for a vast range of complexities. Overall, the supervision system at Cambridge challenged me to think more deeply and learn in a completely novel way, which, although scary at first, has truly improved my intellectual capacities as a student.