Time: 6:05 pm
Number of coffees already drunk after one official day of O-week: 4 (my hands are literally shaking...)
Emotional state: Exhausted and in need of a cuppa, but overall thrilled by the lovely events of today!
I suppose I better start from the begining for ya, eh?!
Well, in preparation for O-week beginning, last night I laid out my clothes on my desk chair, went off to bed dutifully at 10pm, and woke at the perfect time to the bright sun, shining through the edge of my blinds. I slipped easily into the outfit I'd pre-prepared, made myself a cup of tea and some honey-on-toast, then waited for no longer than a minute before my tram pulled up at the stop. After meeting Thalia and Arky at Flinders Street Station, we laughed and gossed and made out way easily to our different orientation groups, where I instantly found my lovely host and his group, whom which we became sort of a big family type of unit, laughing along as if we'd known each other for yonks already....
Okay, okay, so none of this actually happened, as you've probably guessed by now (or else realised there was no sun at all that could've woken me!). In reality, my day went something along the lines of this: being woken by my mum after sleeping through my alarm (...and going to bed at midnight last night), then hearing the hail pound against my window and stressing about what to wear to be weather-appropriate but not a total dag... burning my toast, being totally drenched by the time I got onto a packed tram so that I somewhat resembled a drowned rat for the rest of the day; meeting up with my friends on the Swanston Street tram only to hear someone exclaim loudly, 'who would do creative writing for Arts?!', and someone else say, 'I don't know what kind of person who would do history for their breadth! Geez!' (um... hi... me?!). Sadly leaving my friends, I wandered around aimlessly for ages around the huge campus, awkwardly passing different groups with my giant umbrella (and slipping over), then eventually I somehow found the right building my Host had told us he would be at, only to not find my group at all! I must have asked at least 6 different Hosts and their groups if I was at the right one... and then, fearing I would be homeless for the entire rest of my first day of uni, I explained my desperate situation to an Arts Host ("Um, hi... I can't find my group and I'm homeless and please can I stay with you or else I'll be on my own in this rain forever and ever!!"), who immediately told me to come join as she was taking on all the orphans, as well as her own group! I could've given her a hug.
Long story short - I think I may have joined one of the best orientation groups ever, even if we weren't a big 'family', everyone was really nice, my host was totally dedicated and helpful, and I made some new friends, especially a lovely girl who I had lots in common with, and was meant to be in my original group - so our friendship was meant to be! The heavy rain eventually made way for a blue sky, and therefore you can see, all was well in the end.
As some wise person once said, "let the o-week adventures continue!" Amen, sistah.
Simone writes to you surrounded by a huge array of o-week pamphlets and freebies, and unfortunately realised when she looked in the mirror that afternoon when she got home, that she'd worn her stripy top inside out, all day.... indeed, she also did this on her first day of year 7 with the school jumper. A new, rather embarrassing, tradition for Simone's first days has thus been born.
Tomorrow I'm moving, so today I decided to spend the day doing things I love. Then I realised that I a) still have some packing to do b) have packed up my books and movies so I can't use them and c) am far too pathetically sentimental for the music etc I can listen to to make me happy.
So now I'm listen to the wonderful album version of Jonas Brothers' Lovebug (Hey Joe's a girl!) and staring nostalgically at my bedroom.
The thing is, I'm not nervous about Melbourne. I know the city (sufficiently enough) I know the uni, I know at least a few people and how different will it really be to sit in my bedroom on the internet there than it is here? The only time I ever remember getting homesick was two years ago when I was house-sitting for my sister on the other side of (our rather small) town. The house was full of locusts (there was a legit plague through town), the kitten was insane and I was sick. Like, aching and cold and hot and exhausted, the kind of sick where you just want a hug and a cry. I did the crying alright. But (knock on wood) I feel healthy enough at the moment, so what's there to be nervous about?
Although, it is weird to think that next time I blog it'll be from my new room.
It's pouring with rain as I write this; the clouds outside are heavy and dark and spooky - ahh, and lots of lightning too!! My desk has a metre wide, ceiling-to-floor window right next to it that gives me some outlook into the world whilst on Facebook studying, and today it is covered in droplets of water. The rain isn't really pitter-pattering in that Hollywood, romantic kind of way on the roof, but pelting down, a real storm. A tempest, to quote my old mate Shakespeare! (I promise I'm not Prospero summoning this tempest to get revenge on my evil brother and the king...). But the heat is still stifling, and so there is a fan on my desk too, blowing my hair around crazily. Typical Melbourne weather to have changed so drastically from a brilliantly sunny morning, to this!
Today has been a good day, a good one-of-the-last-days of this summer. I met two of my good highschool friends at the local pool, let's call them Arky and Thalia, each also going to Uni Melb's o-week next week. We did some, eh, incredible 'swimming' of a few laps (about 300 metres in total!), to feel we'd done our exercise (...for the week...), and to earn the junkfood we planned to eat afterwards, but basically spent the whole time laying in the water with kickboards under our arms to float, having an incredibly good time chit chatting about our excitement for next week - Arky, who has asked me to tell you she is from Noa's ark (don't ask!), is doing Biomedicine, and Thalia doing Environments. I will be sure to update you on our O-week adventures!
To change the subject really drastically, at the moment I'm re-reading vlogger John Green's book The Fault in Our Stars, about this kind of pessimistic (but likeable) girl with cancer, Hazel Grace, and the boy she meets at a lame cancer support group, the lovely, funny Augustus Waters. It's a great read - not a depressing, illness-recovery book, nor an unrealistic romance. It's not Atonement, my 10/10 book, but I definitely highly recommended it. But it is sad. If there's one good thing about reading a book like that though, it's that it makes me reflect - in a kind of soppy way - about my own life, as an eighteen year old girl, about to begin at one of the best universities in Australia, the world my oyster. My family is well, I'm healthy, I have some really close, lovely friends. Reading a book like that... without sounding like I pity teenagers with an illness, because I think John Green made a point in that book about how young people like Hazel and Augustus really didn't want to be pitied or anything... kind of opens up your eyes to the opportunties you have in your own life. Sure, you have a kind of bad job as a checkout chick and so you find yourself in an oversized stripey shirt at a supermarket three times a week, being yelled at by a customer for putting dishwashing liquid in the same plastic bag as oranges (god forbid!!). And, sure, you sometimes have little arguments with your parents, your younger sister. You wish you had some better clothes, with the transition from school uniform to casual everyday meaning you're suddenly struggling for wardrobe choices. You're nervous about starting uni, hoping you'll make some good friends, you'll like your course, you won't fail, you won't end up as a lonely cat lady in the end...
But in comparison to having cancer?! My little worries seem ridiculously trivial. Thanks, John Green; indeed I will attempt to 'live [my] best life today', as the social worker Patrick puts it.
I hope this post hasn't been too reflective for you... let's blame the hailing rain, and my reading a sad book! :)
What are you reading at the moment? I'm nearly finished and desperate for new book! Are their any particular books that have made you stop and think about something, or changed you in some way?
PS. Shoutout to my lovely, nerd-fighting friend (and fastmeandering vlogger, subtle plug much ;) ), Mary, for her recommendation to John Green - this post wouldn't exist without you excitedly showing me your signed copy of The Fault In Our Stars and insisting I buy one too!
"Hey! It's been a long time! How is uni going? Sucks we are so far away now. Monash and Melbourne...
What are you doing on Friday? Oh okay, are they from Monash? Okay, no problem. We'll catch up some other time, then. Have fun on Friday! "
It has been reported that many high-school friendships end at uni.
Many students go to different campuses, meet people who are more alike, who share more with each other. In the end, a long friendship withers and wilts and a new one blossoms atop the ruins of the last.
I hope and will try to always keep my closest friends, no matter the distance and schedules that may separate us. Sometimes I think friendships spring up through simple circumstances where two people end up in the same place consistently and distance can kill that. I had a best friend when I was younger, but when I caught a permanent inter-continental flight, it was pretty much over, pretty much right at the start. We grew to find new ways to enjoy the time, and new people to do it with.
At times, it doesn't take much to be friends. All it takes is both people accepting each other and knowing a few personal things. Once two people do that, they can be more or less true to their genuine character, because one accepts the other for who that other person is. There's no major holding back that's symptomatic of strangers when they strike up a conversation.
That's why it's so easy to neglect old friends - a person can always open up and be accepted by another. And that someone might turn out to be in the same course, on the same campus - the things that make it easier. A friendship of convenience.
Have you ever had a friendship of convenience? Do you have a friend you don't talk to or see anymore?
The friendships I would love to keep, not in the selective house-cleaning way of course, are those that extend from just acceptance and familiarity. The best-friends who know me through and through, but also have something that connects us, something more special than knowing each other's personal profile. With university fast approaching, this will be tested.
Different timetables, new locations, new responsibilities : are all known killers of convenience-friendships. However, true mates will have other things that connect them, even when a handy shared location is stretched from a 20 minute tram ride to a 3 hour hike. It's worthwhile not because the commuting is short, but for the friend at the other end of the journey when the commuting is done. And that connection will carry friends over the line to finish the life race as BFs 4 5evahhh. Or in more moderate terms than that.
Here's a cyber toast to true friendship. May all of us keep old buddies and make some new ones, those who are not 'convenient', but just right.
PS How are you preparing for O-Week?
I'm using the same method as when I 'studied' for the GAT.
Kiryll
If Simone feels bad for not blogging in a week I can't imagine what she thinks of me! I promise I've legitimately busy or away from computers.
I'm currently in the middle of packing up my entire bedroom in preparation for the big move this weekend. I still have to organise exactly what day I'm moving down to the big city. I was in Melbs yesterday, staying with my sister yet again and signed my lease, picked up my keys etc. My bedroom is a particularly lovely (read: ugly) yellow colour, but I think I can squeeze most of my books onto my shelf so it's all good. (I probably could've fitted them all had I not bought six new books last week.) (And by new I mean I already had ebooks of half of them, I just like hard copy books.) i feel ready for the city now that, when people ask me question on and about public transport, I know the answers.
By the way, I can confidently say that our uni pones Adelaide Uni. I was over there visiting family and friends and we had a wander through, checked out the library. I definitely didn't get that happy feeling I get walking onto the UniMelb campus. And they don't even have a bean bag section in their library anymore, let alone one like Rowden White.
But I should get back to work. even if I'm out of cardbard boxes, I have a lot of sorting to do.
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...)
Charles Dickens takes on University
What are you expecting university to be like? What are you hoping this three year plus journey will bring? Right now, there are thousands of Y12 finishers including me who are going to board a starship to a whole new galaxy - UniLife 200Z3b. But I know that in just a few months, all of us will have settled in and will regard tutes, lectures and assignments as normal, not the hazy unknown we see it as now. Whenever something novel happened or presented it-self to me, I was really excited, couldn't believe it, counting my lucky stars. But after a while, the new events and objects were subsumed in my reality. They became normal and everyday.
And I think that's what's going to happen to university life as well, I will adapt! But what if I don't? What if I suffer a forever-not-adapted curse and retire to an undisclosed island till the end of time to dwell on my existence? What if in 50 years a police robot finds this post and releases it to all university students to scare them and my curse becomes Hogwarts folklore?
I must come prepared. I must draw up a chart of what to expect from university, using friends and stereotypes because these sources are infallible.
When it comes to study
- Oracle says: You shall study less than during VCE. Study will be fun, with sunshine and no all nighters.
Truth may be: I will never have a life again. I will read all day, write notes all day and sleep not because I want to, but because my body just shut down.
- Oracle says: You have total freedom : some lectures do not require your attending. Enjoy your-self, your coffee/latte/hot chocolate is waiting.
Truth says: You have total freedom. But not going to lectures will ensure your freedom is usurped by extra study.
- Oracle says: You will have great relations with ALL your lecturers, on a close and cordial basis.
Truth says: Most lecturers will not know you, forget your name in the first weeks, mistake you for somebody else.
When in comes to social life
- Oracle says: You will go out almost every day. Your day will start at 12 pm and finish in a taxi cab faring home at 3 am.
Truth says: Your friends will go out almost every day. Your day will start at 8 am and finish at your desk at 3 am.
- Oracle says: Shots Shots Shots!!
Truth says: Everyone but you will exclaim "Shots Shots Shots", a sober life is a life with a healthy liver.
- Oracle says: Uni is a friend-monger. You will be extremely happy with the life long buddies you make along the way.
Truth says: Uni is definitely a place where you will make life long friends who share your passions.
When it comes to family life
- Oracle says: You will have your own cosy Manhattan-esque apartment in Fitzroy, sharing it with your best-friends.
Truth says: You will rent out your room from your parents, asking for permission to have sleepovers with your best-friends.
- Oracle says: Your parents will be supportive of the career path you take upon graduation.
Truth says: Your parents will be supportive of the career path you take upon their recommendation.
- Oracle says: Family is family. You will always be close.
Truth agrees.
With these expectations ready, I will make sure to pin them up on my wall and study them assiduously. I really do hope uni will be great. And I know it will. I'll make sure of it.
Hope everyone had a morning, day and a night.
Ciao! I hope you're having a lovely weekend/week/whenever/where ever you are reading this!
So - I'm sure you'll pick this up fairly quickly through my blogs, but I think I should warn you that I'm quite fond of lists. Resolutions, goals, budgets, favourite things, things-to-do, DO NOT FORGET, things-I-may-or-may-not-need-to-bring-to-xxx.... not that I actually look at these lists ever again, really. They're too often hidden away in rushed scribble at the back of random notebooks until I find them again months later and think, 'oh! I really shouldn't have put runners on my 'To Take To Schoolies' list! Pfff! As if I even considered that I might exercise!!'. But perhaps with a few of my uni-related lists saved up here on First_year@Melb blogs I will be able to look back on them and tell you how accurate/helpful/silly my forget-me-not lists really were.
So, without further ado, I give you my List of Stuff to Do In Prep. For University! list! (If I've left anything out please do comment, any advice at this point is much appreciated!).
- Buy an appropriate bag to carry textbooks/laptop/notebooks in at uni. My entire school life was spent lugging around an awfully big schoolish backpack and so I'm determined to find something a little more... stylish? ... if it doesn't threaten to tear any muscles in my shoulders
- Get my Melb. Uni ID card and try really hard not to blink/pull bad face/have frizzy hair day for the photo. I've been warned that this is the photo used for the entire 3 years of your degree so you don't want to look too much like a dag! Mind, after 6 years of terrible school photos (is there something those photographers do to make you look so awful? Or is it just that I blink so often that after they've taken it six times my smile is faded and cheeks flushed with embarrassment that make them look bad?), I think I'll be able to handle a dodgy photo on this ID pretty easily! Cross your fingers, though...
- Go stationary shopping!! This will forever be one of my favourite things about starting a new semester at school... or should I say uni now... wandering the aisles of Officeworks, or Typo if that's your thing, smelling the paper as one of my friends' loves to do with every new book or notepad she gets (she's a weird one but I love her so much anyway! :P ). A few of my friends and I have decided to make a little cute day out of this. (Don't judge us! New pens and blank pages are just really exciting, okay! I am determined to be as honest as possible in this blog so you may just have to deal with my stationary fettish!)
- Print out my timetable (I'm at uni every day with about 15 contact hours, a lot more than I expected for Arts!), and my friends' timetables, so I can stalk them after their classes - kidding! and finally, consider buying a cool new 2013 weekly diary. Though since it is already February I'm not sure how many I'll find....
Promise to add to this list as I think of more things!
Peace and love and hope you're well :)
xxx
Or the day I met Ron and found my self lost in University of Melbourne (The)
It was a fine Thursday morning when I caught the 8:11 Flinders Street train to the city. After a big break from school and the commuting that was required to get there, it was a wistful journey as it reminded me of the routine life I am hopefully leaving behind. It was also strange to stand next to current VCE or other Year level students and hear their conversations about school life. For those readers starting Y12 and who will call them-selves "The Class of 2013", good luck for the year ahead! I remember my first school assembly as a Y12, or the 'ruler' of the school as I used to look at Y12s when I was in the years bellow. My then coordinator at the assembly - let's don the name Jax, likened VCE as a Tour de France. After what has happened to cycling as a professional sport, I don't think Jax will be using that analogy again.
But.
He did say that VCE is a long marathon where you have to prepare from day one for "that final uphill sprint" - the exams. Because I was intimidated by the grandeur of it, I paid close attention on that day.
But not for the day s, weeks and months that followed. If I have one piece of intel to divulge, it would be: to start VCE mode from day 1, the type of seriousness that is needed when preparing for exams or doing parallel parking. I was one of the students who took it more seriously in the middle of the year and if my study intensity can be plotted on a graph (not that it should), it would resemble an exponential graph, instead of a steady flat line somewhere between 90 and 100% intensity. If I have one regret about last year, it's that I treated it like all the other years of high school. I didn't make it, like the teachers wanted - special. So I didn't do things like: making a disciplined study timetable, turning off my phone when studying, setting mini goals to achieve during the night, even finishing the homework that teachers don't really check but may have come in handy. Stuff like that. VCE is a test of one's discipline and how willing one is prepared to go. I hope that jarring section helps.
Where was I? Oh yes, on the train to meet the fabled Ron. Apart from the general silence of nearby businesswo(men), I was squeezed next to a group of students talking about their upcoming school athletics:
"You doing the triple jump?"
"Yeah, man, doing everything except two events. X is going to destroy high jump, though."
"Isn't he jumping for Victoria (the state)?", whether this conversation made me miss school or not, it certainly told me that my life will never again feature Casual Fridays or pondering about wagging house swimming or writing my class initials on everything (12C). Do you guys miss school? Have you thought about it at all in these few months? With these wistful thoughts I made my way up a billion and 1 escalators from Melbourne Central to the tram stop across the famous State Library - home to a billion and 1 students during November each year. At the tram stop, I played a detective game where I tried to guess who was also going to Melbourne University that day - almost everyone.
But once I got there, all kinds of geographical problems broke loose. Thank goodness for the trusty sidekick - the Lost On Campus app, or else I would surely have fallen in the hands of the evil Dr Disorientation. In what followed next, I galloped from one end of uni to the other, from Baldwin Spencer Building, past Redmond Barry to the Sidney Myer Asia Centre and finally to a terrace office on the opposite side of the road. Coincidentally, the office I was looking for was visible all along from the tram stop ... 30 metres away. However, in between all that to and fro, there were the staff at the university without whose help I would have ended up walking past my destination on the way home without realising it. The problem of the whole saga was, I didn't know which building was Ron's office. Lost on Campus can tell me where all the buildings are, but not in which building I should be. And this is where I come to the crux of the story.
Back in high school, you knew all the upcoming events and requirements because they were given to you: over the speaker, through those yellow pamphlets at the end of class, through your teacher. That's why the staff at the central office in school hated when students asked them questions, because we were already meant to know the answer from countless Amazon forests that were shoved down our bags. But here in uni, things are different. We don't have a lecturer coming to our house and telling us exactly what to do for our enrolment. All the information we need is up there (if I were an Apple employee, I would say all of it is up there, in the Cloud) but we, not the teacher, have to access it.
From that Thursday morning I learnt that the staff here in Melbourne are always willing to help. They won't get angry and strangle me with a phone cord, but will inquire as to what a student needs and make sure the student gets it, even if it requires calling up another staff member from a different faculty or management.
As Peter Parker's grandfather wisely said "With great (independence), comes great responsibility. But people here in Melbourne are also willing to help, son."
Kiryll writes from his room, where this article originally appeared.
Greetings to all! Welcome to my very first blog post!
Just as Briony Tallis in one of my favourite novels, McEwan's Atonement, declares, there is indeed nothing to be lost by beginning at the beginning - so who am I?! I'm a city gal who lives in the inner Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, loves books and writing, and has an interest in environmentalism, politics and following the AFL. I've spent two weeks of my long, beautiful summer holidays in Byron Bay with my family, many days having coffees and catchups with friends, and others fighting with inside-out, ripped and squashed green bags, and asking customers if they have Flybuys, at my casual job at Coles.
It's been a brilliant break from the craze of last years study, and though I can't really believe I'll soon be back into the thick of assignments and exams, knowing I'll be starting university soon is so exciting! Your whole school career leads up to this moment - or mine did. And so to have gotten into my first preference, at a beautiful Hogwarts-style campus, doing subjects I'm quite sure I'll enjoy, is really awesome. Well worth the pain of year 12!
So in approximately 3 weeks - only! The time has flown! - is my first O-week at Melbourne Uni, and then I will begin a Bachelor of Arts. I'm not really sure what I want to major in next year yet; there are so many subjects that interest me. At the moment my three career aspirations are: to be a primary school teacher like my dad, a child psychologist, or an author/journalist, so suitably my first year at Melbourne consists of subjects in Psych, Creative Writing and Media and Communications.
Choosing an Arts degree seems perfect the moment; so much flexibility, and enough time to think deeply about life and The Future before I have to dig deep and commit to what I want to specialise in. In a comforting kind of way, my university subjects are very similar to my VCE subjects - I did 3/4 Psych in year eleven, Media, Literature, English, Health and Human Devel. and Further Maths in year 12.
I know it will be a bit weird and scary at first. The campus is huge (thank god for my 'lost on campus' app that both makes me look sociable on my phone and a lot less like a newbie holding out a giant map to find my class!), and while a few of my friends from school will be at Melbourne too, I won't know anybody in most of my lectures and tutes. In some ways I miss high school a little, especially seeing my sister go off and meet all of her friends, skipping up the street in her checkered school dress and Madeleine style school hat/bonnet (actually, I think she drags herself there every morning and refuses to ever wear that hat)... but one door closes, another opens, as the cliche goes. Let it begin!
Love,
xxxxx
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