Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, week 2.65
Of course, sometimes there are days when everything seems, well, right, somehow.
These are the sorts of days when you drag your mature student ass into university early. You get half an hour's peace on a computer in the library before a bank of young women set up opposite you and talk non-stop, but that's okay, being as if the ipod's on low enough, you won't get yelled at by a library maven, so you can complete your assignment to the strains of Johnny Cash.
The Judge said 'Son, what is your alibi? If you were somewhere else, then you don't have to die'
I said not a word, though it meant my life - I'd been in the arms of my best friend's wife.
So the assignment just seems to fly by, and suddenly there's a second wind allowing you to keep studying, to attempt to simmer down lots of study into a few pages of notes.
Then suddenly it's midday, and then there's lunch, and then an editing class followed by a really good lecture.
I have to be honest.
I've not always been a writer for Eton Crow.
Way back when, I used to write a column on blog.co.uk. Okay, column isn't entirely accurate, but it's not entirely inaccurate, either. I used to write about music, and I used to receive promo records, but I knocked that on the head because it felt dishonest, somehow. So here's the admission nobody in particular's been waiting for; I used to be Stompy Robot, and now when I look back at the column I wrote about advice for new students, I think it's kind of, well... Interesting...
I know, I know, too many ellipses. And yet...
... I find it interesting. Of the students I've met, they all seem to have their own laptops, and the newest mobile phones, and mp3 players and all this newfangled stuff that makes me think, well, how the hell did we manage back in the last century?
I'm serious. I know how old this makes me sound, but when I started my first degree in 1999, I considered myself lucky to have a TV with a video player build in. The nearest computers were in a searing hot (all year round) basement and there were sixteen computers for the approximately 400 students living there.
Not that people used them much, of course, because the internet was boring as shit way back then. Seriously, the most interesting thing I did was play Popex and check my hotmail. Oh, and, occasionally, yes, write essays.
The most sophisticated consoles were the N64 (Oh, for a game of Goldeneye) and the PS1. DVDs weren't massively available. You just had to put up with videos, which meant using the campus video library - not wonderful, but not too bad either - or buying videos at exorbitant rates, which wasn't really an option for a student.
So the next time, young people, that you're torrenting a film or whatever and you think that's difficult, put it this way; would you rather have watched it on a video tape that many, many other students had worn thin over the years with no guarantee it would actually work?
Young people these days, blah, blah, blah. Of course, in ten years' time when we're all watching films on individualised goggles with terabytes of internal memory and accessing alternate realities and locative art, you'll look back on these days and think... Yes, I remember the days when I actually had to click a mouse...
Tuesday 13 October 2009
Thursday 8 October 2009
The Judge said, 'Son, what is your alibi?
Our Director writes:
Diary of a Mature Student, Week One Point Five
I thought you might like to read a bit more about a typical day-in-the-life of a mature student, since posting has kind of slowed down recently. So let's start with last Tuesday, which was fairly typical.
6:30am
Wake up. Prepare breakfast and packed lunch. Do various necessary household things.
7:15am
Leave house while still under cover of darkness. Begin journey by car.
7:32am
Turn left, where possible.
8:00am
Arrive at city park and ride scheme. Wait for bus.
8:10
Continue journey by bus.
8:30
Arrive at university. Proceed to library, and find it devoid of students. Enjoy peace and quiet but a nagging feeling that everything's gone a bit I am Legend until other people turn up.
Attempt to locate several books, with a success rate of approximately 60%.
9:30
Leave library for first lecture. Cram into 'intimate setting' of the lecture room. Resist urge to sit in the centre of the front row like several other mature students who are present. Begin to wonder if this is any indication that I am a bad person.
11:30
Lecture finishes.
11:45
Lunch.
12:30
Return to library or, if needed, computer room. Continue studying until eyes cannot focus.
12:45 just kidding 14:00
Attempt to locate academic advisor's office.
14:20
Locate advisor's office. Attempt to locate any indication of advisor's office hours.
14:30
Find sheet advising of office hours in a (possibly deliberately) obscure location.
Discover advisor's office hours are two hours on a Monday, or, as we prefer to think of it, the only day there are currently no lectures, and thus, no reason to attend on campus.
Decide advisor is a Machiavellian schemer, or simply doesn't like undergraduates*.
15:30
Begin journey home.
16:30
Arrive at destination.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This may actually have more truth to it than the faculty would like to admit. Consider that in our orientation and in our first lecture we were cheerfully informed that one in ten of us are statistically likely to undergo some trial, hardship, illness or other problem that forces us to drop out after the first year. On this course, that means approximately 20-25 students are statistically likely to just disappear in around eight months time.
This means over a faculty of twelve advisors that each will have at least two students who may not come back. And, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can't tell which ones it'll be. So you can go to all the effort of, oh, say, learning their names, or you can wait and see who makes the grade and who doesn't and work from there.
Of course, this is a highly cynical and totally untrue observation of the situation. I've already expressed my opinions on the very concept of Office Hours, so there's no point revisiting it.
But look at it this way; even if I were a young person, and lived on campus, the likelihood that I would go in just to see my advisor on a day when nothing else was going on is kind of slim. When you factor in a two-and-a-half hour round trip just for a ten-minute meeting, then, well, no. Probably not going to happen.
This means that, at least until next semester, it's incredibly unlikely that I'll even meet my advisor, as she doesn't teach any of the first semester classes and I won't be in during her office hours.
If all of this sounds like I have a serious down on the joyful academic process, please reconsider, because I don't. I just can't. I'm incredibly lucky; I get to go back to university to retrain in a field I love and so far, it's working out really well. The youth of today tolerate me, and, in some cases, may even like me (although this is yet to be scientifically verified). The lecture program is great, the studies are too. I study what I study, I love my classes, I've possibly even got a crazy teacher who wear's dark glasses, things are getting great, and... They're only getting better.
Just don't expect your average mature student to unquestioningly accept academic protocols, that's all...
Diary of a Mature Student, Week One Point Five
I thought you might like to read a bit more about a typical day-in-the-life of a mature student, since posting has kind of slowed down recently. So let's start with last Tuesday, which was fairly typical.
6:30am
Wake up. Prepare breakfast and packed lunch. Do various necessary household things.
7:15am
Leave house while still under cover of darkness. Begin journey by car.
7:32am
Turn left, where possible.
8:00am
Arrive at city park and ride scheme. Wait for bus.
8:10
Continue journey by bus.
8:30
Arrive at university. Proceed to library, and find it devoid of students. Enjoy peace and quiet but a nagging feeling that everything's gone a bit I am Legend until other people turn up.
Attempt to locate several books, with a success rate of approximately 60%.
9:30
Leave library for first lecture. Cram into 'intimate setting' of the lecture room. Resist urge to sit in the centre of the front row like several other mature students who are present. Begin to wonder if this is any indication that I am a bad person.
11:30
Lecture finishes.
11:45
Lunch.
12:30
Return to library or, if needed, computer room. Continue studying until eyes cannot focus.
12:45 just kidding 14:00
Attempt to locate academic advisor's office.
14:20
Locate advisor's office. Attempt to locate any indication of advisor's office hours.
14:30
Find sheet advising of office hours in a (possibly deliberately) obscure location.
Discover advisor's office hours are two hours on a Monday, or, as we prefer to think of it, the only day there are currently no lectures, and thus, no reason to attend on campus.
Decide advisor is a Machiavellian schemer, or simply doesn't like undergraduates*.
15:30
Begin journey home.
16:30
Arrive at destination.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This may actually have more truth to it than the faculty would like to admit. Consider that in our orientation and in our first lecture we were cheerfully informed that one in ten of us are statistically likely to undergo some trial, hardship, illness or other problem that forces us to drop out after the first year. On this course, that means approximately 20-25 students are statistically likely to just disappear in around eight months time.
This means over a faculty of twelve advisors that each will have at least two students who may not come back. And, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you can't tell which ones it'll be. So you can go to all the effort of, oh, say, learning their names, or you can wait and see who makes the grade and who doesn't and work from there.
Of course, this is a highly cynical and totally untrue observation of the situation. I've already expressed my opinions on the very concept of Office Hours, so there's no point revisiting it.
But look at it this way; even if I were a young person, and lived on campus, the likelihood that I would go in just to see my advisor on a day when nothing else was going on is kind of slim. When you factor in a two-and-a-half hour round trip just for a ten-minute meeting, then, well, no. Probably not going to happen.
This means that, at least until next semester, it's incredibly unlikely that I'll even meet my advisor, as she doesn't teach any of the first semester classes and I won't be in during her office hours.
If all of this sounds like I have a serious down on the joyful academic process, please reconsider, because I don't. I just can't. I'm incredibly lucky; I get to go back to university to retrain in a field I love and so far, it's working out really well. The youth of today tolerate me, and, in some cases, may even like me (although this is yet to be scientifically verified). The lecture program is great, the studies are too. I study what I study, I love my classes, I've possibly even got a crazy teacher who wear's dark glasses, things are getting great, and... They're only getting better.
Just don't expect your average mature student to unquestioningly accept academic protocols, that's all...
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