Getting that travel bug… (Suzanne)

So, I’m safely home in Hong Kong now. And every time I fly home I remember how much I love long-haul flights. This isn’t sarcasm, either. Where else do you get to watch movies for eight hours on end and get served wine, ice cream, and a selection of newspapers?

I also love airports. It’s the one time I don’t feel guilty about spending all afternoon in the bookstore. After all, it’s not my fault that I have to check in early for international flights and thus can’t use the time for anything more productive.

Although I’m not a fan of the shorter connecting flights. Those suck. You have to pay for your food separately, there’s no inflight entertainment, and you’re still exposed to the risk of deep vein thrombosis from too much sitting. At least on long haul flights you get food to distract you from the feeling of blood clotting in your legs.

Anyway. Now that I have finished my long-haul flights for this semester, I have invariably been thinking about how to get more of them in. Being a somewhat obsessive person, I am also thinking about productive things to do because when not busy I tend to redirect my energies towards unhealthy things like playing The Sims for six hours at a time or spending a lot of money eating unhealthy things with high school friends (I’ve been here two days and already I cannot believe how much I have spent on jumbo iced coffees at Starbucks — in a country where there is no minimum wage/Youth Allowance and the best-paid summer job I’ve ever had paid around AU$4 an hour, spending money is a rather unhealthy habit even if socialising isn’t). As this is a uni blog, I thus present all the uni-related excuses to hop on a plane and travel that I know of:

Exchange. Behold, the Melbourne Global Mobility office. Many options here. Relatively cheap way to study in another country, because after you graduate no-one will give you scholarships to go on exchange (as a bonus, if you go to the US or UK you only pay Aussie fees and not the exorbitant fees of the home country’s system – but of course, it’s never really cheap to move to another country). Anyway. I’ve been thinking of going to either the US or to South Africa, but since I can’t leave Melbourne until I finish my compulsory law subjects in 2010 this is all very preliminary.

Uni subjects taught overseas. In law, we have a subject called Institutions in International Law which is taught in Geneva over the winter. Also the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London, but that’s closer to an exchange since it takes up a whole semester and several subjects worth of credit. Art History has one taught in New York, though I have no idea what it’s called. I’m sure other departments and faculties have them too. Pretty expensive, because the scholarship money is a little less generous than it is for exchange. And you have to do a 5,000 word research essay. But you get a lot out of this kind of experience – for Institutions, you get to go behind the scenes of the United Nations, have dinner with diplomats, the whole shebang. They’re also during breaks, which is a little bit more convenient for people doing fixed courses who can’t skip a semester so easily. Can’t apply for these yet either because I haven’t finished the prerequisites.

Music Camp. I’m strongly considering applying for three music camps at the moment: a Kennedy Center program, which is in Washington DC, the Norfolk Chamber Music festival, which is in rural Connecticut, and the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. These are all free, including several weeks of food and accommodation. Lucerne will even fund your plane ticket — you don’t have to spend a cent. Unfortunately, the competition for these is really really high — they’re pre-professional programs and the standard at these camps goes far beyond what is expected at the Con. I have until January 20th to become a professional-level player if I want to get in, which doesn’t really seem like it’ll work out so I might save myself the $50 application fee and the cost of hiring an accompanist and not apply. They do, however, offer world-class opportunities commensurate with their selectivity – Norfolk is run by the music school at Yale and has several Grammy/Avery Fisher winners on their staff; Lucerne is run by Pierre Boulez, who probably doesn’t mean a lot to non-musos, but he’s probably the most historically significant composer alive (also probably one of the least popular, who writes some of the least accessible music, but in music that tends to be taken as a sign of greatness) and responsible for or influential in a very large number of historical developments in music post-WWII (post-serialism, an increasingly mathematical and theoretical approach to composition, electronic music), and the Kennedy Centre is where the politicians in DC go to chill out to classical music. I don’t really know if it’s worth it to spend a few hundred dollars doing the applications, though, and maybe that money would be better saved for next year when I’d have a better chance. There are less selective camps around, which often also offer great opportunities (a friend came back from a program in Italy that intensively teaches Italian and music simultaneously, which is especially good for aspiring opera singers; also, I’m going to be applying to the International Clarinet Association competition in the hopes of making it to the finals in Portugal), but they cost money, and usually quite a bit of it.

Working overseas. There’s the usual teach-English-in-Japan-type/au pair program, which I don’t know very much about. But you can also do legal clerkships overseas, and if you can find a place and a way to fund it many non-profits overseas take volunteers or interns. Many university subjects will give you credit for internships. You can also apply for some internships through the uni — a friend of mine is going to be interning in a US government agency in Washington DC around the time of the Presidential Inauguration. Also, these tend to pay for themselves, unless you work for a really prestigious agency that doesn’t need to pay to attract talent, or a really underfunded one that can’t afford to do so (like the UN, which falls under both headings.)

And, in the event that there’s no good reason to go on a long-haul flight for the heck of it, here are some other options I have been considering:

U21 Global Issues program. You can do either a diploma or certificate, which are 8 subjects and 4 subjects respectively. There are some subjects taught at Melbourne, but also many taught online at other universities, and they’re all about the world and related things like nationalism and globalisation. I’ve overloaded enough that by the end of next year I will be 4 subjects ahead and will be able to take this without altering my courseplan at all. (Wow, I feel like a workaholic.) But the prospect of getting up at 1 am to participate in an online discussion with students in Sweden doesn’t really appeal.

Diploma of Modern Languages. You could also prepare for going overseas by accumulating skill in a shiny new language. Unless you’re like me and you hate learning languages like nothing you’ve ever hated before.

ANU Summer Research Scholarship. This involves going to Canberra, which is kind of like another country. Or another planet, depending on your opinion of Canberra. At the very least it’s getting out of Melbourne for a bit, albeit it involves work and is in a city that is probably the most boring place on the planet. But you get to do cutting edge research and live in their colleges for free, and you may get a really good reference or a publishable paper out of it, so worth it if you feel studious next summer.

A normal job. It pays for all the other options. Enough said.