Student Bloggers

Typing away on a Wednesday night and only one more contact hour left this week. Yes, I have 3-day (Lucy claims it's pretty much four-day) weekends. This is a strange way to be in school. Almost every class has only one lecture a week, and the workshops/tutorials once a week. I had one workshop so far (the others start next week), and it’s basically an opportunity to work through problems with fellow students and ask for help from the lecturer (professor) or tutor (TA), depending on who runs the workshop.

Even just one week into uni, here are a few trends I’ve noticed:

• Lectures tend to start late and end early. Each lecture is recorded and posted online (so you really don’t have to go to class if you don’t want to), so the lecturer starts setting up the recording at the hour before lecturing. Since there’s no passing period, the lecturer must end 5-10 minutes early to allow the next class can come in and set up. So in reality, a 2-hour lecture is much shorter than 120 minutes: with the 10-minute break in the middle, instruction time is slightly over 90 minutes. So if my math class has a 2-hour lecture every week for 13 weeks, that’s only about 1300 minutes (assuming each lecture is ~100 min), compared to 200 min/week x 10 weeks = 2000 minutes of instruction per class at SCU. There is workshop, but in terms of learning new material, that’s only 65% of what a class would be back home. Hm.
• Uni is not just for 17-22 year-olds. For my Aboriginal and Torre Islander people unit (class), about 1/3 of the class is comprised of older women (two of them said they are 44yo; one of them has grandchildren already…). Even my math classes have students who are clearly not in their teens/early 20s. So the man I met last Friday is not a special case. He was told to follow his passion and worked as a chef because he loved to cook. Ended up hating it (long shifts, no weekends, average pay at best), and came back to school to study something in business. Seems like reality isn’t what we always think it is. And I like this tertiary/post-secondary opportunity as a second, even third chance. Maybe people do go back to uni in the US too, but from my narrow view of America, all I’ve seen is people graduating high school, heading straight to uni for 4-5 years, and doing grad school/working after. It’s quite expensive to spend $80K-334K USD discovering what you want to do with your life. Or worse, be deep in debt and hate what you spent the last four years studying. But as my parents say, uni is not so much about what you learn, but the process of the learning. You cultivate self-discipline, discover your interests, and perfect the art of procrastination. Amidst the independence and freedom, you develop who you are. Maybe. Anyway, we’re deep in a bunny trail. Maybe this is why classes only meet once a week. By concentrating all the teaching material on one day, people can work more normal part-time jobs. Or do uni on the side? Not sure. 
• There are so many microwaves! And lots of students bring lunches. Yes, most of them commute to school. At orientation, the faculty explained this: it’s due to the geography of Australia. Because Aus is mostly desert, settlers were only able to live close to each other, creating cities (like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth). Where there are people, there is education. The unis were built, and people (all living decently close to it) went to the uni in their city. So basically there isn’t the travel-across-the-country to another uni because that’s not the culture. There are no on-campus housing, but plenty of student accomodations close to campus (I’m in one of them) that house mostly international students. So I guess there’s not really a “dorm life” here, which is fine. 

Other Australian things:

• Muesli. Muesli is a mix of rolled oats, bran, nuts, dried fruit (btw sultanas are raisins), and seeds (in more expensive muesli). The best way to describe it is probably granola ingredients (but not yet granola). I had a muesli bar on the plane and wanted a breakfast food that wasn’t toast, so I went to the supermarket and spent 1/2 hour trying to decide which kind of muesli to buy. It was very difficult. But I finally got the Pecan and Peach flavoured one, and it’s pretty good. I’ll probably go back to regular cereal after this, but I’m glad I tried it.
• 2-hole puncher (and international-sized paper). I printed out the first few pages of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto 1 and was about to hole-punch the sheets to put in my music binder when I discovered that the hole-puncher in the library was a 2-hole puncher. I went up to the help desk and asked for a 3-hole puncher, and they pulled one out from the closet (except it’s not really a hole puncher, but a hole screwer. You had to turn these knobs so the mechanism screwed holes in your paper). I ended up just drawing circles on the page where the holes should be and using the 2-hole puncher. The paper is also international size. The one closest to 8.5”x11” is A4 (A3 is twice as big), which is slightly longer. America, why do you have to be different?

I finally got into a practice room! The process here is not as easy as SCU's (which makes sense since there are 50K students at QUT), and I can’t just swipe my card to get in, but thank God everything worked out. I have to make a booking (reservation) online of the room (preferably 72 hours before) and ask a staff to let me in, but it’s all good. The building is definitely called Creative Industries for a reason. The studio has amplifiers, mic stands, a drum set  and there’s a tech booth where you can borrow more tech things for recording sessions. The rooms are definitely more versatile and sound-proof compared to SCU's practice rooms. I also discovered that an alarm goes off if the door is left open for more than two minutes. I just need to go the bathroom faster next time.

The Epicurus garden is located just outside Urbanest gives out free veggies. Volunteers help pick them Tues-Thurs from 7-11am, and they are free for the community to take! I got bok choy and red mustard today, and I cooked the bok choy for dinner (see pictures below). It was yummy. Definitely going back again to get more fresh (did I say free?) food. 

Brisbane also offers free dance classes in South Bank for the next four weeks, and I went to a swing and jive class tonight (something I would never do back home). We learned a progressive swing dance (where everyone dances in a circle and you switch partners every time) and a jive routine. The girl I partnered with (Millie) is in her sixth year of uni