Thank goodness for extensions

Hello? Can anyone hear me? I’m over here, underneath all the research for the Power essay which is due tomorrow and I haven’t started yet. Thank goodness for extensions, hey? My children were all sick last week (nothing serious, just colds, but it meant they needed to be home) which has set off a chain reaction of assignment extension requests as, if you read my last post you’ll know, no work is getting done when they’re around! I actually managed to organise with some friends that I could study at their house while they were at work, but after three days of being home with snotty, sniffly, whingy children it’s entirely possible that I had a nap on their couch and played with their cat…

It has been a hectic couple of weeks though, with essays coming out of my ears – well, I WISH they would come out so easily, rather than spending hours staring at a blank screen with not a single decent paragraph or even sentence coming to mind.

Thank goodness my tutors have been very understanding and more than happy to grant a few extra days to the tasks.

 

The other day I was remembering how I felt when I first started at the University of Melbourne. I was so thrilled to have been accepted, but as the beginning of the academic year drew closer I started to get nervous. Specifically, I was nervous about tutorials. You see, I was sure that once I attended my first tutorial, everyone would realise that a mistake had been made, and I’m actually not smart enough to be here. It seems silly now because of course that didn’t happen, but it’s truly how I felt. Sometimes we really are our own worst enemies, convincing ourselves that somehow we are undeserving, or not good enough.

 

A couple of lessons I have learned in the past week:

1. If you decide to live dangerously and watch a lecture online on the train on the way to the relevant tutorial, make sure you actually download the correct lecture, and not last weeks.

2. When you haven’t heard the lecture due to the issue mentioned in point 1, you can type on your laptop during the tutorial with a thoughtful frown on your face – this way you look too busy for the tutor to call on you when you have no idea what they are talking about.

 

I hope everyone is managing to stay on top of it all!