Our First Foray
Welcome to This Week We Learnt.
“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Welcome, all, to the inaugural issue of This Week We Learnt!
So, at last, we took the plunge and started this Substack. This is a long-in-the-works enterprise born somewhere between late-night procrastination and the noble (self-justifying) desire to simply do something with our ever-growing archive of ideas, anecdotes, and indulgently verbose voice notes we send each other from opposite ends of the country. Consider this publication the result of letting curiosity run unexamined and unsupervised.
We are both fortunate enough to be utterly, if perhaps overly, invested in our degrees: and more broadly with learning itself. We hold close the conviction that learning at university is not just about what ends up on the exams. It is, fundamentally, about the abandoned essay tangents, personal resonances, and the slow, oft amorphous process of figuring out how one actually thinks. It is this curiosity and capacity to discover ideas in motion that we quietly fear will atrophy when university ends and working life begins.
This is the philosophy, coloured by a mild trepidation, from which This Week We Learnt was born.
Each week, we’ll take turns writing articles, thought pieces and anecdotes about topics we encounter in the worlds of Classics and Psychology. We are not necessarily concerned with polished conclusions or having the “right” take; it’s about documenting the process of learning as it actually happens: messy, unfinished, and open to revision, critique, and the insights of others. Think of this as the jumbled blurt of notes and tangential thoughts you create long before the finished essay.
But first, a little about each of us and what you can expect!
Salve! I’m Olive, a third-year at Cambridge University reading Classics. A subject perhaps both familiar and faintly esoteric to the discerning Substack reader, Classics is the ultimate magpie discipline: literature, art, archaeology, philosophy, language—all things ancient claim my fascination. Though this field is not without its challenges: I must still endure the perpetual low-level horror that is Ancient Greek translation (if anyone can be convinced, Latin is far more intriguing).
What can you expect from me? Long ramblings, inexplicable pretension (for which I could apologise, but I am a Classics student so it comes with the territory), and repeated recourse to Virgilian literature and its timeless wisdom. Classics does not exist in a vacuum (despite rumours to the contrary); its modern echoes are all around, persistent and endlessly relevant, and I do (with great enthusiasm) hope to draw them out wherever I can.
Hello, I’m Alex! I am a third-year at Cardiff University studying Psychology. Currently, I am on placement in Bristol with the Nutrition and Behaviour Unit! What does this consist of? Well… I struggle to find a concise enough answer at the best of times but think of the realm of eating behaviours and food choice and you’d be in the right ballpark.
Similar to Olive, I am also smitten with Psychology. Despite being a relatively new discipline (two sides of the spectrum here), I firmly believe it has something that anyone could like. Human behaviour never ceases to amaze me with its simultaneous complexity and simplicity. I hope to convince even the staunchest humanities fiends of the beauty of this strange science.
What can you expect from me? The strange and unusual, the used-to-be-common-sense-but-we-gave-a-name-to-it-and-now-its-a-scientific-phenomenon and everything in between! Always with the firm and frequent disclaimer that this is based on current hypotheses which may or may not be disproved in the future. At its core though, studying psychology is, I believe, one of the best ways of understanding ourselves and the way we exist in the world, so I hope to give the brilliance of your brain the reverence it deserves.
So that’s us. And this, readers, is This Week We Learnt.
Thank you for being here from the start.
Until next week,
I’m excited! Yay!
so excited for what's to come!