One week to go! The countdown begins (Simone)

Alas, it appears that it has been an entire 7 days since I last blogged! The time is flying! After the longest stretch of Summer holidays us ‘Class of 2012-ers’ have had in our lives, there is but a week until Orientation Week officially starts. The butterflies are beginning to churn; not just from excitement, but in anticipation, too. I can’t help but begin to worry – will I like uni? What if I can’t get back into the studying drill I had so down pat through VCE? What if I’ve picked the wrong subjects? But I guess I just have to remind myself, like the ‘Grandma Willow’ humours in Disney’s Pocahontas ( – I’m really not sure how I remember these quotes !), “what if the sky falls down and your nose falls off?”. In other words, there isn’t much I can really do about the ‘what ifs’, the ‘maybes’. So I keep reminding myself that uni WILL be everything I hope it will be, everything I make it.

Actually, after missing the Academic Advice Day being on holiday, I attended a helpful course counselling session with an Arts advisor, and if there was one thing she said that helped this whole transition faze, it was: “Sometimes Arts students get a bit lonely” – cue the four us in the little group look at each other with panicked expressions, imagining ourselves sitting on the South Lawn all by ourselves eating lunch every day, awkwardly approaching tutorials without any friends, running to catch the tram like a year 7 in the first week so as to get home as fast as possible to avoid more uncomfortable lonesome afternoons…. – but then, she said, “so try and make university what YOU want it to be. Get into the clubs and societies, don’t be shy to say hello to people. Uni is about getting out there.” She’d given us reassuring smiles and left. Similarly, as a first year psych student (subject to change, ahem, I will keep you updated!), I received an email to all first year psych-ers labelled ‘Mind, Brain & Behaviour 1: and how not to worry’ that basically said, ‘apparently you’re all stressing about psych: stop worrying! There’s no need! It will be fine!’ in a really positive, funny tone that made me smile and relax a bit more. So it seems we’re all in the same boat. It’s scary stuff, this whole big Life Change thing (- shout out to Kiryll here, I definitely think we are boarding the UniLife 200Z3b !). But I’m equally as excited, too.

Also – I must keep you up to date with my whole list of things to do before uni list… regretfully, it is mostly incomplete, but I did say that my lists were not always very useful! However, I am now the proud card-holder of my very own University of Melbourne ID card, and, though one eye does look slightly bigger than the other, the photo could be much much worse! So one tick on the list, and no terribly frizzy hair/parted fringe! (What is the hash tag, twitter users? #lifewin?!). And, in other news, my uni-bag shopping is getting desperate, with limited options for sturdy looking nice bags around… and I have no idea what type of stationary to buy. Notebooks? Folders?! Hmmm…

Love,

xxxx

PS. With this blog in mind, I took a couple of (random) photos around Melbourne Uni that I thought may/may not be of interest to the kind people of the blogsphere out there (since getting an iphone I have been quite addicted to taking photos of everything and anything! Another little new fettish of mine).

This one is my favourite tree (yes, I have favourite trees, and take pictures of them…) so far at UniMelb’s Parkville campus. It covers a lovely cafe in cool shade away from Melbourne’s blistering summer heat. Even in the email from the psychology coodinator outlined to find some trees to enjoy, so really I am only taking orders…

 

I like this photo, too, for what it ‘represents’; in a corny, VCE English Language Analysis type of way, if I were to analyse this photo I think I would say it could be suggestive of how I am entering through the arched doorways of a new life (*cue thoughtful, non-existant beard stroking…)