Christopher Wollin

My experiences as a physics exchange student in Nairobi 

September 2005

General information

The Physics Department of the University of Nairobi offers a very friendly atmosphere to conduct one’s studies. There was no favor denied, especially to us exchange students, and we always encountered willing support in all our affairs concerning our comfort and organization. At the beginning of our study visit for instance we were instantly helped to establish internet access. Unlike our Kenyan classmates who must attend compulsory and elective courses corresponding to their year of study, we were also granted a great freedom of choice allowing us to visit a variety of courses cutting through the division of years and disciplines as to complete our German curriculum.

The Berlin-Nairobi Exchange must be accounted for this facilitation and I thank the initiator for letting me participate in his organization. I must note its achievements in establishing, maintaining and even expanding a bridge of scientific exchange between Germany and Kenya. Unfortunately the DAAD’s expectations of the German exchange students are beyond their contribution to these achievements and thus the latter may remain unrecognized.

The Department’s equipment is very simple and old fashioned but still serves the needs of a basic education. Although often flawed by power disturbances and viruses, the computer lab continuously offers access to the internet and electronic data processing. As far as I was able to get an insight, the same applies to the constituents of physical experiments in the practical part of the physics-course.

Although this setting was very enjoyable, the course outline and contents as well as a dense but undisciplined organization of the schedule, made the studying itself a rather frustrating experience. To adapt myself to this setting was very difficult. I was not able to meet all my expectations and now I think my presence could have been more useful to the benefit of all, if I had committed myself less to the 4th year coursework and rather filled a position of an assistant to one of the 1st or 2nd year lecturers helping for instance to revise submitted assignments in order to ease their workload and to enhance the students’ opportunity to have guided discussions on the course contents.


Critique on the course- or class-work of the UoN-Physics-Department

First of all one has to note that the Physics-course at the UoN is taught in very dense class-work compared to my home university. While we spend approximately the same time in class and with experiments, in Germany we were taught less subjects in one semester: on average three, at the most four, while UoN requires students to register for at least five. The lecture-hours per course are three hours per week in both universities. But while the TU-Berlin filled up the difference of hours spent in class with tutorials and practices (in German: Übungen), the UoN-Physics-Department did not offer continuously accompanied classes held by teaching assistants besides the lectures. I understood that although a tutorial-system is planed, it could not be implemented at the moment due to financial restrictions imposed by the University administration.

To my astonishment I observed a different level of difficulty between courses taught within one generation of students, i.e. within the 4th year. I only attended courses of the same, 4th year, and found that some lecturers begin their course with very elementary physics, which I have been acquainted with for years, and last long before advancing to new and unknown contents. Other lecturers instead stepped into advanced physics immediately establishing only a vague link to already covered material, which made it very difficult to follow right from the start.

During class-work several lecturers disappointed me for their way of presenting the course content. Many tended to simply read out their notes expecting students to write down their ready formulated essay. Others, who gave out a script but organized their lecture so strictly along the same that it also only consisted of reading it out, used to finish a lecture just after one third of the given time. Therefore there was hardly any communication between lecturer and students, questions rarely asked or properly answered.

A familiar challenge also encountered by UoN lecturers is the teaching of physical concepts, which are described by advanced mathematics. I remember the problem of quickly reaching a boundary to physical explanations, due to the unavailability of mathematical tools, being addressed by all teachers along my career as a physics student. But although the UoN’s Bachelor of Physics-Programme puts a priority to mathematics in the first two years of the course, from those students who want to major in physics even requiring to attend classes in the mathematics department, I still had the impression that the mathematical background was insufficient for the theoretical physics taught in 4th year.

Other aspects I want to mention were the continued change of the schedule during the running semester by individual lecturers, the difficulty of approaching the lecturer for questions related to the course contents and the irregular control of the student’s learning success: the lecturers have no fixed visiting hours and thus a meeting is left to chance. Further, during each course two larger assignments or tutorials were handed out, whose answering was part of the course-work and final grade. My impression was that the latter was their only purpose and thus the tutorials do not fulfill the function of the students’ self control in terms of their understanding of the course contents. This function was met even less as there were only two tutorials and the submitted answers were not marked in detail, i.e. without further comments, and sometimes returned only shortly before the final exam (in my home university we used to submit assignments on a weekly basis).

In my opinion the exams would therefore hardly test the understanding of a physical concept by examining the ability to apply the same on a variation of a taught problem but instead expect the repetition of entire memorized sections of the lecturer’s notes which were read out in class before.

Of course there were also strong exceptions of lecturers who took into account the weak mathematical background and were very patient to revise mathematical concepts and to illustrate their connections to physics in an understandable manner. Unfortunately the majority of classes were taught in the way described above which lead to frustration, not only on my but also on my classmates side, and to my dropping of several courses. This is sad in so far, as the ratio of students to lecturers is considerably good and would allow a fruitful discussion in most of the classes. I suspect that lecturers are still overworked and cannot devote much time to their students.


Courses visited - in detail

Lectures attended in the Department of

Mathematics:

Partial Differential Equations of First Order
 <>Partial Differential Equations of Second Order (dropped)
Functional Analysis

Physics:

Statistical Physics
Atomic Physics (dropped)
Elementary Particle Physics (exceptionally good)
Nuclear Physics
Solid State Physics II
Computer Simulation

I also registered for the Project-Course during which 4th year students would independently work themselves into one of several proposed fields of physics, write a report and hold a ten minute long presentation at the end of the year. There was a vast range of topics from Geophysics to experimental physics to theoretical astrophysics. I submitted a work on “Physical Vapor Deposition using Sputtering” conducted by the Department’s Workgroup concerned with research on “Dye Sensitized Solar Cells”. This was a nice experience since the students were granted great freedom of choice which aspects of their topic they wanted to stress or cover at all. It was even possible to propose ones own topic for research. I regret of not having put more effort in this particular aspect of the course and instead working within one of the proposed projects. Otherwise this course strongly trains ones methods of literature-search and -order.


Courses outside the Physics-Department: Development Studies and Swahili

My ambitions to attend courses outside the frame of physics were soon given up. At first, in the beginning of the first semester I acquired permission to attend classes of a Master-Course within the Institute of Development Studies. But it soon became apparent that simultaneously following of physics and economy lectures was difficult to combine since both required considerable effort and time. Additionally the schedules did not comply and then my interests developed to understand theoretical physics rather than theoretical economy.

I managed to learn a good basis of the second official language Swahili. One of the exchange students and I hired a private teacher whom we met almost three times per week for one and a half hours in the beginning of our study visit. Our meetings reduced to once per week of recent though. But still I was able to work myself into the most important grammatical structures and my vocabulary is sufficient by now to understand slightly a random conversation and to bargain and shop on the local markets or to inform myself on the whereabouts of specific localities.


The Berlin-Nairobi Exchange

I must state once more that my study visit overall was very pleasant and an enriching experience for me. Unfortunately, besides the fact that it took me quite some time until I was able to admit to my classmates my financial background and that I was not paying school nor accommodation fees while the UoN has almost doubled the same for the coming term without pledging the government to increase its loans simultaneously, I also found myself uncomfortable with and must criticize much of the course-work I was exposed to. Of course I learned part of the lesson in each course but the studies beside the project, the Elementary Particle Physics lecture and my Swahili-lessons were rather unsatisfactory which will be reflected in my grades. This conflicts me as I was chosen and to come here in strive for academic excellence.

But it also conflicts the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange as the financial support of its German students in Nairobi relies on DAAD’s scholarships, which are awarded for the achievement of good grades. This aspect of the exchange programme is unfortunately troubled by the very different teaching conditions encountered at UoN, as I tried to point out above.

Other contributions of the German exchange students towards the establishment of the exchange programmes links and contacts though, should not be underestimated. I was able to witness how the German exchange students organized several seminars held by German academics on visit, facilitated the collaboration of the UoN Physics Department with a research-group from Bremen, Germany, which is executing an experiment in Nairobi, and established personal contact with scientists from all over East-Africa in order to launch a project on renewable energies in Uganda financed by German sponsors. One must also mention the friendship between the German exchange students and the last and the coming generation of PhD students, which worked and going to work at the Hahn-Meitner-Institute in Berlin-Wannsee.

To my disappointment I must admit that I remained a witness only to most of these events and the actual experience was gathered by my exchange-student colleagues. They were self-sponsored and thus, I believe, less bound to the 4th year class-work. While they became more and more involved in the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange’s activities outside the curriculum, I rather lost contact over time.

As might be seen in the separating activities pursued by the individuals, I note that my generation of exchange students was less of a team than the generation before us might have been. The reason for this cannot only be found in our different characters, I believe, but also in our different financial background, which inflicted a competition and rivalry but did not strengthen the team between us participants right form the beginning, even before leaving for Nairobi.

Therefore I want to recommend to the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange to seek an equal financial environment for the participants, and ask the DAAD to take up continuous support for at least two exchange students again, in order to allow, in the shadow of compromised academic excellence, to grow this channel of scientific exchange.


Conclusion

Summarizing I want to point out that we German exchange students have a different educational background than Kenyan students and thus different abilities regarding physics. While my Kenyan classmates were able to gather huge quantities of information and had definitions on their fingertips our strength was to apply mathematical concepts on a physical problem, to break the same into its small constituents and to rather develop a formula than having it ready on demand. In my opinion undergraduate physicists at UoN get less attention when it comes to the detailed teaching and understanding of the very basic physical concepts and methods. They also do get little response to questions or little opportunity to ask them. I believe this is a major flaw of physics education at UoN, where my home university certainly has an advantage.

But I strongly believe that fruitful physics can not exist without questioning. In order to give Kenyan physicists the platform for such I would like to promote the tutorial-system in the Physics-Department of UoN which exists at my home university where qualified and advanced students from as early as their 3rd year repeat the class work related to the assignments for new and fresh students in their 1st or 2nd year and help the lecturer to correct the submitted answers. The assistant teacher, or “tutor” as he is called at German universities, would benefit as he acquires the additional qualification of teaching experience. Students might be less timid in asking questions to someone they can relate to in age and knowledge. The lecturer would win time he could invest in the preparation of additional assignments in order to implement a more continues control of the students learning success (of course a Kenyan student who works as such an assistant must be paid, but compared to the employment of an additional qualified doctor the costs would be significantly low).


Acknowledgements

Finally I want to thank the UoN Physics Department, especially its chairman, for its and his generous hospitality. It is remarkable because I have never experienced such patience and friendliness with guests before. It surly was more than Kenyan devotion.

In all my critique I never meant to insult nor talk bad. Instead I hope that the scientists of UoN, the Berlin-Nairobi Exchange and DAAD find and understand my German instinct to perfection and functionality, which I wished to see implemented.
Christopher Wollin, September 2005

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