"... You don't need to be here anymore."

Our Director Writes:

Diary of a Mature Student, Part -0.5

Still, technically, not a typo. This is, apparently, 'Week Zero', which is a polite way of saying get your fucking act in gear, lectures start next week and it's not up to us to sort you out, young person. Or, in my case, mature young person.

Words have difficulty describing how strange it is being surrounded by people born in the 1990s; it's the first time I've honestly felt generational, in that I'm able to define my generation against the current generation in a way I was never able to with the previous generation. Plus, none of them get my topical references, which, as Jamie Madrox notes, is kinda hellish.

I got all retrospective last week and decided to email two of my previous lecturers who fostered my current subject interest, and was extremely gratified to get a response from both wishing me well and noting how good it was that someone remembered their teachers from a while ago. I don't really know where the impulse came from; if I had to guess, I'd say that I needed to reconnect with my previous academic life before I embark on the new one, with a touch of retroactive continuity. Because if there's one thing I have, that the present crop of students don't have so much of, it's a past...

At least the enrolment procedure is just as much fun as it always was. Timetabling choices are extremely odd - at least, to me, coming from a background of organising things. For instance, on one day, all the students are told to be in one place at one time only to be told 'this talk lasts for an hour, after which you can piss off for two hours before the next thing happens.' This didn't make that much sense, at least, not only to me but to others; why not summon us an hour and a half later and not have us milling around for two hours? On another day, one meeting was held in the morning and students were then encouraged to meet their advisor in the afternoon, with no explanation as to what to do in the three hour gap in-between.

It all reeks of power games, oddly, on the part of the faculty. Not to blot my copybook before I've even started, but if I'd summoned my student body for a 9am meeting, I'd arrange my office hours - just for that day, mind, not for much more - to begin approximately half-an-hour after the meeting finished while the students were still (A) there and (B) had an attention span.

Making your student body wait for several hours because you're being inflexible - for whatever reason, but come on, it's week zero; what exactly are you doing if your second-and-third year students aren't even around and your freshers don't get any work set for another seven days? Why not just pretend for three days that the students - homogenous body of young people as they are - actually matter, instead of making them wait because you can?

Don't misunderstand me; if the faculty have lots to do, with many meetings to attend, forms to fill in, paperwork to read and people to meet, then timetabling is a necessary evil. This is more a mature student problem than anything else, of course, because freshers tend to live on or near campus and can head home for a beer and a session on Xbox live, as I understand the young people of today call it. But if your journey home is more of a commute, and there's nothing else to do on campus, that three hour wait suddenly becomes that much more depressing.

I mean, what are you supposed to do? Study?