Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Perpignan: Pragmatique, Rhétorique et disciplines connexes en Lettres et Sciences Humaines
General: Deadline extensions & EMA Meeting
by Izabela Araújo
Dear Crossways students,
This is Izabela, your representative, speaking! How is the end of the semester going? I hope you are all doing fine; looking forward for the summer, I suppose!
This email has two important pieces of information for you. The first one concerns only the final year or one-year program students who are thinking of asking for a deadline extension for the Final Dissertation.
In case you are a two-year program student in Semester 4 and you are considering asking for an extension, please follow these steps:
1. Have a concrete reason for asking for the deadline extension. "It's very difficult to finish" is not a good reason!
2. Write an objective email clearly stating your reason. This email should be a formal request addressed to:
a. Your main supervisor (University A/Semester 1 & 3)
b. Your co-supervisor (University C/Semester 4)
c. A copy to the Supervisor's Coordinator in Saint Andrews Dr Dave Evans (dee3@st-andrews.ac.uk)
d. A copy to Mlle Cheryl Stanton from Perpignan (cheryl.stanton@univ-perp.fr)
3. You will receive an answer from each one of these people, the final one being from Dr Evans.
You must send your request until 20/May, NEXT TUESDAY! If deferred, your deadline will be extended until 20/September. 
In case you are a direct-entry one-year program student in Semester 2 and you are considering asking for an extension, please follow these steps:
1. Have a concrete reason for asking for the deadline extension. "It's very difficult to finish" is not a good reason!
2. Write an objective email clearly stating your reason. This email should be a formal request addressed to:
a. Your main supervisor (University A/Semester 1)
b. Your co-supervisor (University B/Semester 2)
c. A copy to the Supervisor's Coordinator in Saint Andrews Dr Dave Evans (dee3@st-andrews.ac.uk)
d. A copy to Mlle Cheryl Stanton from Perpignan (cheryl.stanton@univ-perp.fr)
3. You will receive an answer from each one of these people, the final one being from Dr Evans.
You must send your request until 20/September. If deferred, your deadline will be extended until 20/December.
Please find below the letter I have written to my own supervisors with my request. Cheryl advised me to post it to you as a model, due to its clarity and objectivity. Please don't copy and paste it! It is supposed to serve as an example to be followed, not to be copied. Please include your reasons in the clearest way possible, so that you can receive a positive answer quickly.
If you have any further questions about this process, please refer to the Dissertation Guidelines (Useful Links section on the left) or write directly to Mlle Cheryl Stanton.
The second piece of information concerns all students and it is about the 2nd EMA (Erasmus Mundus Student and Alumni Association) General Assembly. As you may remember, the 1st GA was in October/07 in Brussels. There, I, representative of the Crossways students, and Inesa, representative of the Crossways alumni, attended the meetings, participated in the discussions and joined each one of us one working team.
The 2nd GA will take place on 6th and 7th June in Perugia, Italy, as you probably already know. As I am part of the EMA Newsletter team, I will be going to Perugia this year as a member of the team, not as a Crossways representative. The EMA requested that courses accredited in 2004 or 2005 should send an alumnus (ex-student), or someone who would graduate soon. For that reason, I would like to introduce you to our representative in the GA this year: the alumnus Natasha Sardzovska. If you have any queries of questions you would like us to discuss in the GA, please write to us.
If you are not familiar with the EMA (Erasmus Mundus Student and Alumni Association) and don't have a clue of what I've been talking about, please visit www.em-a.eu and check out the website. The EMA is a student association that is run by students for students. You should register on the website so you can have access to the newsletters and to members-only sections on the website, such as accommodation and jobs ads. You are more than welcome to join us, not only on the website, but also in many other ways which the EMA makes available to you. Again, if you have any questions, please write to me!
Last, but not least, I would like to share with you a great piece of news (you will read about it in the next newsletter as well!): the launching of the StudyinEurope website. This website was created to promote high education and to facilitate the coming of student to Europe. It brings all kinds of information about courses, programs, scholarships, and the life here. So, if you happen to know someone who is interested in coming to study in Europe, please spread the word and let them know about this brand new tool that is now available. Of course that, if you are considering to follow a doctor's degree, the website will be extremely helpful for you as well!! Take a look at www.study-in-europe.org and enjoy!
Finally, I wish you all a great end of the semester and a hot and nice summer, with or without the lovely company of your dissertations! We'll send out some news about the GA during the summer!
Best,
Izabela
Model extension request
Student's name (email)
To: Prof AAAAA (email)
Prof BBBBB (email)
CC: Prof Dave Evans (dee3@st-andrews.ac.uk)
Mlle Cheryl Stanton (cheryl.stanton@univ-perp.fr)
Lisbon, 6th May 2008.
Dear Supervisors,
I am writing to you in order to request officially for an extension of the deadline of my final dissertation for the Erasmus Mundus master program "Crossways in European Humanities".
Throughout the program, I have found it very difficult to define the theme of my dissertation, what resulted in a problem in limiting my primary corpus of study as well. Even after I had written my Dissertation report last year, I was not sure whether the theme I had chosen was good enough - a question raised by my main supervisor and my Semester 2 co-supervisor later on. It was not until Semester 3 (last October) that I finally decided upon my theme and attempted to define my primary corpus of study. However, when I arrived in my Semester 4 University, i.e. in Lisbon, I met my co-supervisor, who happened be a specialist in my theme. He advised me to change two out of the three novels from the primary corpus I had already selected in Sheffield. Even though there were concerns about changing the corpus again, my two supervisors and I finally agreed that this last change would strengthen my dissertation and would make it much more interesting.
Even though this choice resulted satisfactorily for the three of us - my two supervisors and myself -, it made my task of finishing the dissertation before 20th June rather difficult, since now I will have to do a new research for two out of those three novels. However, I believe that this final choice of the primary corpus will make my dissertation a much better work and for that reason I ask you to allow me to have a deadline extension.
If you have any further questions regarding my dissertation, please do not hesitate to contact me. I hope to hear from you and/or from Perpignan soon with an answer to my request.
Yours sincerely,
XXXX
