With a spare hour between, after or before lectures often spent meandering around Dublin’s city centre, students all too often ignore the wealth of procrastination opportunities at their fingertips right on campus. Going to a public lecture is an excellent way to kill an hour, and besides, it is a well-established fact that learning is a lot more fun when it’s optional. It is good to stretch your academic muscles every once in awhile and challenge yourself to try something new, beyond the comfort of your course.
You know that barrage of emails your Trinity email account is flooded with every Sunday night? You know the routine you almost automatically follow of skimming subject lines and systematically deleting anything not directly relevant to your course? Stop giving in to clichéd millennial impatience and give these – admittedly boringly phrased – emails a chance.
Easily accessible public lectures are held regularly throughout the college year and by almost every department. Lecture series in your own department run outside mandatory modules and can give students a chance to study a favourite topic in more detail. Similarly, they can help you edge ever closer to that perfect Dead Poets Society moment by giving you an extra 50 minutes with your favourite lecturer.
Going to these more subject-specific public lectures can help you find others with similar interests and could be great for those in larger courses to meet kindred spirits. You might become the only first-year maths student with an understanding of ancient Roman architecture or the origins of 1980s synth-pop music or the only theology student who can say they’ve been to the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute (TBSI). The range of public lectures available in Trinity is incredibly extensive, you just need to keep your finger on the pulse.
Lunchtime public lectures can help break up a long gap between classes. Public lectures that take place in the evening are often free or very reasonably priced and are perfect for when you’re the last of your friends on campus and find that the next train isn’t for another hour and half.
Public lectures this year are set to be as wide-ranging as ever – we’ve already seen examples this month from the School of Physics with their space-themed events on the back of “Space Week Ireland”. This month also sees the beginning of the Biomedical Frontiers lecture series as well as the brand new lecture series from the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies – definitely ones to watch out for as they continue. Never to be outdone, the School of English will also be running weekly public lectures on key canonical texts with everything from Hamlet to The Great Gatsby.
Open lectures are never as severe or as strict as your mandatory classes. They are simply a chance to learn something you may not have known otherwise from world-leading experts in their field. If the old adage is true that you learn something new everyday anyway, why not make it something worthwhile. Spend that spare hour in Trinity wisely.
