"At uni, you will have loads of free time, won't have to study, and will spend every night out at bars getting crunk with your new mates", they said (Simone)

A friend’s dad recently remarked, ‘Oh, you’re doing Arts, pfff! So that means you’re spending every night out at bars getting sloshed!’ Ahem, no, not really! For some reason a lot of people seem to think that uni students, especially Arts, are always out at crazy parties, but I’ve done a mini-survery of my fellow Arts friends, and though we agree we have had some great nights out, in truth, more of our nights (read: evenings/late afternoons) are spent in pyjamas drinking Earl Grey tea and doing tomorrow’s readings rather than at a club doing shots until 3am!

Myth #2 that I’ve conquered over this first semester has been that at uni you will have loads of free time and no homework. Drrrrrr, not true. Even as an Arts student who has “no hours”, there is a lot of study still to be done, a lot of latte’s to be had, and study freakouts sadly still do exist, albeit not as intense as those that you know could affect your ATAR and future. Mine started with the fretting over neuroscience in Psychology, and then included the scrambling search for an idea for a poem, the struggle to understand Marxism and Foucault’s disciplines, and the difficulty in learning how to reference properly, which seems easy until your tutor is writing side notes like ‘this should be in italics’ when your little website told you it shouldn’t be and you wonder why italics seems to matter so much anyway (exhale).

But you know what? University has actually turned out to be more than okay, even without an abundance of partying and with the existence of some serious studying. The last twelve weeks have been a whirlwind of changes and adventures – stressful, exciting, challenging and inspiring all at once. After emerging out of the end of that initial anxiety of the first few weeks, stress that included running around the campus to find different lecture theatres, keeping up with crazy pages of intellectual readings that didn’t seem to make any sense, meeting heaps of lovely new people and forgetting their names and then trying desperately to remember them, submitting first assignments and essays for each subject – and having no idea what the results would look like when they came back – it’s so good to be able to say that here, at this point, things are pretty great. I would go as far as to say that even though I can’t wait for some much needed sleep ins, and the free time of the holidays, I’m going to miss the people and classes of semester one quite a lot.

Ahh, well, I guess I better actually do some study… until next time, good luck with swatvac!

♥

PS. Not procrastinating or anything, but a a few snaps for you..

End of a concert at Rod Laver – one of the highlights of the semester!