Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Post Crunch-Week, Pre-Total Crunch
So Slump Week is over.
This is not necessarily a good thing.
Slump Week, as discussed, was the time when study fatigue starts to kick in, because it's all learning and no application.
However, thanks to the vagaries of scheduling, slump week was immediately followed by Crunch Week, which contained no less than five deadlines across three courses co-inciding.
And, of course, if any one of these deadlines gets pushed even slightly, you end up pulling all-nighters, and that, to be frank and speaking from recent experience, is a young person's game.
I'm ready to admit to pulling a couple of all-nighters during my first time on the merry-go-round, but - crucially - not for study. I like being a creature of deadlines, don't get me wrong, but if you're still drinking coffee and cursing like a sailor at 3a.m. the night before something is due, then boy howdy, you need some kind of time management thing going on.
And so it was that on Wednesday this week, following a mandatory all-nighter, I ended up driving home at 4a.m. for the first time in, like, well, ever.
Driving at four in the morning after an all-day-all-night work assignment is kind of bizarre, because I was too wired to sleep but too terrified of falling asleep at the wheel to do anything other than ride a strange adrenaline rush that made navigating the dark, orange-hued and, crucially, wet roads home a very, very strange experience.
Where I'm studying has a kind of weird kink, in that it runs the two semester program - much like the first place I attended - but with a weird Easter Holidays thing built in, whereby in week eight you take a two week break in order to come back for weeks nine through twelve.
It is, as I say, a bit weird.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for holidays, but like I said above, I'm a creature of deadlines, the main one of which that is occupying my concern at the moment lies after the two week break during which you can, crucially, do almost nothing in terms of work towards it.
This strikes me as odd. It's the opposite of pleasure delaying; it's anxiety-prolonging, stress-increasing and generally ever-so-slightly sadistic. It's not like the students don't get a five month summer break, after all; so to dump two weeks into the schedule two-thirds of the way into the second semester seems like some weird causal hangover from The Way Things Were Always Done back in the day.
In Real World terms - and let's not forget, these courses are supposed to be preparing the underprepared for the Real World, or at least something like it - this makes no sense, unless, frankly, you plan on being a teacher, in which case it makes perfect sense. But here's the rub; for a film course, almost none of the students will end up getting any job other than being a runner after graduation, because of the 'experience' conundrum - i.e. you have to have experience to get the job, but you have to have had a job to get the experience - which means that they go from one broken facsimile of real life to another with, it is devoutly hoped, no waiting.
This is the equivalent of spending three years at business school and then becoming a supermarked cashier for the experience. Don't get me wrong, there is a degree of sense in putting the young, recently-graduated through a difficult job - it winnows out the minnows, it's cheap, easy labour, and it allows those who shine to shine - but if I were a young student faced with this, I can't help but feel I'd be thinking well... what's the point?
Don't mistake me - from the point of view of an Older Person, I have a vague plan as to What To Do Next following this degree, but nothing more concrete than vagueness, because the way the world is at the moment it doesn't feel like making plans is the smart thing to do. No, as Cayce Pollard would have it, it's all about the jack moves...
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