Comparing notes (Suzanne)

It’s interesting, coming back to Hong Kong and finding out about the experiences of all my high school friends. We went to an international school, and generally it’s much more common to go overseas for university in Hong Kong than it is in Australia (I still find it hard to wrap my head around the fact that so many people I’ve met here in Melbourne live close enough to commute to uni from home without the aid of a long distance flight), so my old friends have basically come back from all corners of the globe, and from all sorts of different educational systems. The comparison between different experiences is really quite eye-opening.

For instance, my friend at Oxford is taught almost completely through tutes. Not the ones we have here, of 15-20 people, but tutes where there is one tutor, and at the very most two students. She and her tute partner get reading and an essay of 2000 words on a given topic every week (I’m never going to complain about the one 2000-word essay per semester again), and then come into the tute to present their essay and discuss with their tutors. Lectures and seminars (over there, seminars have a dozen people at most) are almost completely optional for them, and form a supplement to the readings and the discussion. She doesn’t have exams, except one final comprehensive set at the end of her degree, and prelims during first year to see if she’s surviving the transition.

My friends in America and Canada overwhelmingly live on campus, as opposed to the culture here where people generally either commute from home or get their own apartment, unless they’re in college. People stay on campus during weekends, and it’s much more common for clubs etc. to hold their events over the weekend, or late at night. Their schools are generally much smaller (a few thousand undergrads in an average sized university, 10-20,000 at most in the large state universities) so there’s this whole campus community feel where you can walk across the lawn in the middle of the night to borrow notes from someone who lives on the other side of the quad.

Anyway. Hearing about other people’s first years (they’re all in the northern hemisphere, so they’ve finished the whole year by now, not just first semester) makes me kind of jealous, in the superficial ‘grass must be greener over there’ way, and also kind of really excited to do study abroad, which I’ve been planning during my lunch hour at work for the past two weeks.

Also, I think I may want to try to finish my 6 year degree in 5 years, largely because I think the music theory subjects and the practical music subjects should be taken in the same semester due to the fact that they complement each other, rather than in separate semesters under the normal double degree structure. Plus, growing up in a whole range of different countries gives you itchy feet, and the thought of living in the same city for 6 years seems kind of boring — I want to go abroad for postgrad or employment and see the world as soon as possible. Overloading music theory onto the normal prac courseload would mean that I could finish in 5 years if I did four law subjects over summer, but if I went on exchange for law I could take one or two law subjects over the summer instead, which would fit in with my original plans (several law subjects are only available over summer, such as internships and competitions, so I was planning to do a few summer subjects anyway)

This works out quite conveniently in terms of credits and funding, too, because the law faculty is much more generous with exchange scholarships than the music faculty, if only because the required 70% average to go on exchange is so much harder to get in law than it is in most other faculties. The problem is that it would be so much more beneficial to do a music exchange, because the level of competition in Australian music schools is nowhere near the kind of competition you’d see in a top European or American conservatory, and so it seems like a bit of a waste to go on exchange and not at least test the waters on the international music scene. I could do both, but the list of exchange partners which open both the law school and music school to exchange students is very, very small, and the number which have a strong program in both even smaller.

So, what I have worked out in the last two weeks is that I want to do a law exchange sometime in the second semester of 4th year, and because the semester calendars work out juuust right under that plan, I can do a 6 week (northern hemisphere) summer music camp right before, assuming they allow me the right visas. I have my eye on the Tanglewood fellowship, which is a preprofessional training program with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or on Music Academy of the West, similar thing, but a general solo/chamber/ensemble program not affiliated with a specific orchestra in Santa Barbara, California.

Both are very selective, so with that, I’ll leave you all and go practice, because I haven’t done that all holidays due to my job and now that it’s over, I need to really move or I’ll fail next semester’s recital.