This statement came from the mouth of my academic advisor during my preliminary interview on Monday. I've been meaning to post it since then but, obviously, haven't gotten around to it until now. Allow me to set the context for the utterance.
The point of a preliminary interview is to get an incoming Ph.D. student acquainted with his three-person advisory committee, and vice versa. We discuss my interests, what I hope to get out of the program, which other professors might be of great help to me, and what courses I should take for the rest of the year. One very important matter is planning out a course of action to prepare myself to meet the program's language requirement. To put it simplisticly, I need to demonstrate competence (not fluency, mind you) in a "research language" other than English by this time next year. A great deal of the contemporary and historical literature I will be engaging during my academic life is or was orginally written in German, so my committee and I targeted that language as the one for which I will take a competency exam during the summer or, at the latest, next fall.
When the head of my committee, Dr. Sheila Davaney, was explaining some of the various means of preparation other students have utilized in the past I said:
"You know, I've seen adds for the Rosetta Stone program on television. I've been thinking about buying that to supplement the limited background in German I already have."
"I'm pretty sure that program is designed to help you speak German, not read it," she replied.
"Really?!" My reaction was surprise tinged with disappointment. "When the commericials said that that the U.S. government used Rosetta Stone to train CIA agents, I thought, 'Cool! I wanna be like Jason Bourne.'"
After the briefest round of laughter, Sheila spoke the quote of note, "Jason Bourne wouldn't be able to read Luther."
I already know what the subject of her statement would have to say in his defense:
The point of a preliminary interview is to get an incoming Ph.D. student acquainted with his three-person advisory committee, and vice versa. We discuss my interests, what I hope to get out of the program, which other professors might be of great help to me, and what courses I should take for the rest of the year. One very important matter is planning out a course of action to prepare myself to meet the program's language requirement. To put it simplisticly, I need to demonstrate competence (not fluency, mind you) in a "research language" other than English by this time next year. A great deal of the contemporary and historical literature I will be engaging during my academic life is or was orginally written in German, so my committee and I targeted that language as the one for which I will take a competency exam during the summer or, at the latest, next fall.
When the head of my committee, Dr. Sheila Davaney, was explaining some of the various means of preparation other students have utilized in the past I said:
"You know, I've seen adds for the Rosetta Stone program on television. I've been thinking about buying that to supplement the limited background in German I already have."
"I'm pretty sure that program is designed to help you speak German, not read it," she replied.
"Really?!" My reaction was surprise tinged with disappointment. "When the commericials said that that the U.S. government used Rosetta Stone to train CIA agents, I thought, 'Cool! I wanna be like Jason Bourne.'"
After the briefest round of laughter, Sheila spoke the quote of note, "Jason Bourne wouldn't be able to read Luther."
I already know what the subject of her statement would have to say in his defense:
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"Matt...Damon."
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