Jayeless

One of the biggest things I’ve noticed about going to uni, and everything associated with that, is that I suddenly have no time to do everything I need and want to do.

Another of the biggest things I’ve noticed is just how much time I waste.

My day is full of periods of time where I’m doing nothing but lack the capability to do anything more. Going to uni each day takes me a bit under an hour, and all I usually do then is listen to my iPod. Once, I used the trip to do my reading for my tutorial on the French Revolution which awaited me at the other end of that bus ride. No others.

And at uni, I can’t use the time between classes to do anything useful (other than eat and caffeinate) because there are never any computers available for use, there is never any convenient place to sit and do some work (okay there probably are but I’ve never found unoccupied ones), and ugh. It’s like some crazily under-resourced over-crowded school.

Actually as an excellent example of how under-resourced and over-crowded my university is, let me say that every single one of my tutorial classes (except possibly linguistics because I haven’t had a linguistics tutorial yet) is bigger than every single one of my year 12 classes. My Spanish class has thirty-six people¹. I mean, what the hell, man?

The third tutor (we have three) also knows this is excessive. There are not enough chairs in her classroom for all the students, so she kicks people out as to allow them to stay would be to violate “health and safety regulations”. Then today she revealed that a maximum of thirty people are allowed in a tutorial group anyway, so next week, she will deny entry to anyone except the first thirty students to arrive, regardless of the number of chairs.

Which is JUST GREAT for me, because immediately before that tutorial I have a linguistics lecture aaaaaall the way over in the Science Precinct. I don’t want to re-allocate to 9am or 10am Friday mornings either, because currently my only Friday class is at 3pm.

Anyway, that is clearly tangential to my original point that I am wasting lots of time during the day, but whatever.

Wasting lots of time is particularly annoying because I have so much to do. I am already behind in linguistics (!) and I have about 4+ hours of work to do in order to catch up. Spanish is overwhelming me (doing the study they actually suggest we should do will only get me 65%ish on tests, judging by today’s quiz). And what about stuff I actually want to do, like write blog entries, or work on my novel, or READ THE NEWS?!

I mean that. I haven’t read the news in two or three weeks. I know bits and pieces about what’s happened, but my vision of recent events is quite sketchy.

I know, I know, I should probably be working on knocking out a few of these tasks rather than writing whiny blog entries. I think I’m too tired for now, though. Hopefully I have the time tomorrow!

1. Actually, I think it had forty originally. One of my tutors today kicked out a few people because there weren’t enough chairs for them, and there were thirty-six remaining after that.

It turned out that my first week of uni was busier than I’d expected. Well, okay, Monday wasn’t very busy and was in fact rather anti-climactic — one linguistics lecture. But Tuesday was busy. Wednesday was even worse. By Thursday I was exhausted, and although I had the day off on Friday (linguistics tutorials only start in week 2), that was when my family went away for the Labour Day weekend.

Because universities suck they don’t actually give students (or staff) the day off for Labour Day (nor any state holiday), which means I missed this week’s Monday’s linguistics lecture. Luckily, I can listen online!

Anyway, I spent a large part of my weekend studying a list of 26 Spanish words. I have a vocabulary test next week (er, this week) on a bunch of words that are NOT the words we learned in class. (We learned how to say useful things like, “Mi carrera es ciencias sociales,” and “Estudio historia.”¹ The test is on useful things like, “Es un lápiz.” CLEARLY everyone needs to know what pencils are called.)

I’ll try to write a more detailed post tomorrow, but basically, international studies has been AWESOME because the lecturer is awesome, my tutor is awesome, and the subject matter is the latter half of the twentieth century which is self-evidently awesome. Judging by this, I chose an excellent major. Linguistics has also been extremely interesting. History looks interesting but we’re doing the French Revolution this week and I am still thoroughly sick of it from VCE, and I haven’t read anything for it yet, and I have a lecture at 9am tomorrow. However, the unit is on the role of wars and revolutions in creating a national consciousness. Funnily enough, this is the same theme as half my Spanish unit, which (unbeknownst to me until last week) is a history unit by stealth. I have to read this book by some extremely annoying historian for Spanish. She does not know how to write a sentence and seems to enjoy rambling about how awesome “the state” is. At least the book is in English…?

So that’s all for now. And sorry if the title of this entry is incorrect Spanish. I will just invoke the point I learned in linguistics last Thursday: prescriptive grammar was only invented in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the satisfaction of people with more money (to spend on dictionaries and grammar books) than sense. Linguistically all grammars are equal, not just the ones written in grammar books. And if my title is all correct, no worries then!

1. The unhelpful book did not list the Spanish terms for “linguistics” or “international studies”, so for the purposes of the class I said I studied history. Which I do. But you know. That’s not all.

I have been super-busy in recent times, and I have the cold and the not-so-nice sunburn to prove it. I haven’t been sick since the illness I ranted about last June¹, so this latest cold has reminded me of exactly why I despise colds. Because it clearly slipped my mind during that months-long reprieve which I probably should be grateful for. But now… ugh!

Anyway, uni starts tomorrow. I have only one class for the whole day, a linguistics lecture. Unfortunately, Monash decided to put this linguistics lecture (and every linguistics lecture) in the “Western Science Lecture Theatre”, which is for the record:

• nowhere near the campus centre
• nowhere near the Arts Precinct
• nowhere near the bus stop
• nowhere near any of the other buildings I have classes in
• nowhere near any of the parts of Monash I have actually been to
• one of the very last buildings before Engineering City²

I have a decent timetable. No days off, but Mondays and Fridays have only one class each, only one day of the week (Tuesday) starts before 11am (starting at 9am), only one day (Wednesday) ends so late that by the time I leave in winter it’ll be dark (at 6pm)… and so on. Clearly it’d be better if some of those “only one day…” and “only one class…” things didn’t happen at all, but still not that bad.

I spent part of yesterday looking over course outlines for “Contemporary worlds” (my international studies unit) and linguistics. It looks like there’s much less overlap between “Contemporary worlds” and next semester’s twentieth-century history unit than I initially thought — Contemporary worlds is pretty much entirely post-WW2 stuff, while twentieth-century history is, you know, about the entire (“short”) twentieth century (so 1914-1991).

Linguistics also looks really good despite its annoying locations and class times and the fact that the entire course handbook is written in Comic Sans MS. There’s assorted stuff on slang, language change over time, the international phonetic alphabet, neurolinguistics… and I get assignments to translate sentences written in obscure languages like Comanche.

I don’t have much else to say for now, so I’ll leave this entry here. I wanted to post something before February actually ended and passed me by. (March’ll be better for my resolution for sure!)

1. Actually, brief and belated update on that: it may have been swine flu. A friend of mine experienced much the same symptoms as me and developed them only a few days after I did… and she, who actually bothered to go to the doctor (I didn’t), was diagnosed with swine flu.
2. Disclaimer: not actually a city, but literally half the campus is just engineering buildings. The bright side is that that’s the half not in close proximity to the bus stop/campus centre/anywhere I need to know, so I can pretend it’s not there for the most part.

It’s been two weeks since I was offered a place in the course I wanted, Arts (Global) at Monash. I’ve almost completed the enrolment process now, including unit enrolment and student IDs. And by the way, Monash has to be the laziest university about putting together student IDs — they don’t take photos for it properly; for mine the guy at the counter pointed at his webcam and said, “Taking your photo now.” I look like I am a ghost, that’s how white my face is, my head is in the bottom-right corner of the photo, and I have a RUBBISH BIN in the background. Furthermore, this is my student ID for the next five years. Yippee!

Anyway, I was going to write a post about the subjects I was doing, but then I realised it wouldn’t be very interesting. I mean, I think it’s interesting, but my readers number more than just me, so I thought I’d just list them briefly and link to unit outlines for the über-curious. For the curious, the subjects I’m doing are:

First Semester

• international studies/history: major world events of the twentieth century (INT1010)
• history: “the long nineteenth century”, or 1789-1914 (HSY1111)
• introduction to linguistics (LIN1010)
• Spanish 1 (SPN1010)

Second Semester

• international studies/history: major issues facing the modern world (INT1020)
• history: wars and revolutions in the twentieth century (HSY1112)
• introduction to linguistics terminology (LIN1020)
• Spanish 2 (SPN1020)

I am contemplating replacing the second-semester history unit with something else, because it is highly probable that there will be overlap between “wars and revolutions of the twentieth century” and “major world events of the twentieth century”. It depends how large that overlap is, though. I don’t want to study the same thing twice, but judging by the unit descriptions they’re not exactly the same thing, because the history units (both HSY1111 and HSY1112, really, but especially the latter) focus on social revolutions and INT1010 looks like it’s more about politics. For instance, HSY1112 seems to gloss over communism almost completely, and INT1010 doesn’t. HSY1112 focuses on stuff like Nazi Germany, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the civil rights movement, which isn’t covered by INT1010 I don’t think. So, if they do focus on different aspects of the twentieth century, I won’t switch HSY1112 for something else. However, I am clearly going to be a twentieth-century expert by the time I’ve emerged from this year of university.

I probably won’t study much history after first-year anyway — I’m allowed to study exactly one history unit as an elective for my major¹ (but, again, it has to be twentieth-century history), and I can study history while I’m on exchange overseas, but that’ll be it. I have to take two “global research” units — one second-year, one third — that will occupy the spaces I would otherwise study history. So studying as much as I can first year might be a good idea.

1. I can technically study two — the requirements for an IS major are the first year sequence, four later-year core units, and two electives. However, I don’t think Monash will let me count my units taken overseas as core units, so that leaves me one elective.

Yesterday, VTAC finally published all the tertiary course offers from 2010. I was offered my first preference — Arts (Global) at Monash University — and so, once I’ve enrolled, I’ll be a student of the Bachelor of Arts (Global).

Arts (Global) is essentially a Bachelor of Arts, just more restrictive (but I mean that in the nicest possible way). Because it’s a requirement of the BA (Global), my major will be international studies. This is fine, because it was going to be international studies or history or politics, anyway. However, it has to be international studies. There is no squirming out of it. There is no doing INT1010 and INT1020 (a first-year sequence for all three) and then deciding afterwards which area of study I want to major in. It’s international studies or… uh, working out how to change my course. Which is probably possible.

Aside from international studies, I want to study linguistics, because that’s sounded like one of the most interesting areas of study ever since I was about thirteen. Alas, the high school curriculum is tailored towards literature crap instead of linguistic awesomeness, so I was never able to¹. But now I am! And in case you couldn’t tell, I am not planning to study English (literature). All throughout high school, my favourite parts of English were all the parts that didn’t involve reading books (or worse: poetry), so a subject all about reading books is probably not one I should take.

I also want to take a second language. I’m undecided between Spanish and French, but I have to decide soon (by the end of next week, I think). I think Spanish would be more useful, since it’s spoken by twice or three times the number of people who speak French, and is the primary language of more countries. However, since I already know some French, it’s tempting to study that because it’d be easier. Right now, I’m probably leaning towards Spanish, but it’s like a 55-45 split.

The last thing that should be mentioned about this course is that it requires me to spend one semester overseas, on exchange, at another university. Of course, this further influences my deliberations over French v. Spanish because I’d probably choose to go to whichever country matched up with my chosen language, which would be France for French, or Mexico for Spanish. Of course, if neither works out, I can also study in another English-speaking country for a semester.

Anyway, I have to spend the next week and a bit scrambling to get enrolment and unit selection over with, but then I’ll be an Arts student at last! Exciting.

1. Unless I wanted to do another distance education subject (in addition to international studies and history)… which I really didn’t!