Melbourne Model vs Heritage Degrees

Reasons I wish I were a Melbourne Model student

  1. Scholarship money. National Scholarships in my year were holistically assessed on a resume, recommendations, and an interview as well as the ENTER score plus some attempts to try to diversify the backgrounds of the scholar cohort. Now everyone with over a 99.90 gets one, and they’re worth 10,000 per annum plus your HECs fees waived. Since I got the equivalent of a 99.95, I’m pretty mad that I didn’t defer for another year – would’ve saved almost $80,000 over the five years that the scholarship covers. That’s a down payment on a house. Or a really fancy car. Or 20 new clarinets. Or 15 years of rent. Or 400 new books. Or nearly 2 years of the median post-graduation salary of my degree.
  2. Breadth subjects and electives – I hate not being able to choose my subjects.
  3. Not having to worry about being taught out.
  4. Law students under the new JD model are pampered like nothing I’ve ever seen before. They’re taught in 15 person classes, their subjects get the highest ranking lecturers (although to be honest, the best lecturers I’ve had so far have been the junior ones), they get all these free lunches for networking, and all while getting everything the LLB students get as well. I wouldn’t pay full-fee for the difference, but a CSP place in the JD would be pretty amazing value for money.
  5. Did I mention the automatic scholarship money?
  6. Everyone in your year graduating in your year. I don’t like the phrase ‘cohort experience’ because it makes you sound like cattle, but it’s nice to have that collegial ‘class of 2010’ feel.

Reasons I’m glad I’m not a Melbourne Model student

  1. Those stupid interdisciplinary subjects like ‘Understanding Asia’ and ‘Democracy’. You can’t do justice to Asia in 12 weeks, there’s several dozen countries and about 5,000 years of civilisation in Asia. Nor could you really do justice to democracy; even if you restricted it to the Western democratic tradition and started from John Stuart Mill instead of the Athenians, that would still be a massive amount of content.

    Plus, first-year interdisciplinary classes should really not be taught in large lecture hall format with exams — they should be small discussion-based seminars with lots of shorter essays and presentations and lots of feedback. I’m aware that this requires a lot of funding. But I think that if you don’t have the resources to do it properly, you shouldn’t do it at all, and instead save the money for the cut Viking Studies seminars (which, by the way, is interdisciplinary – Swedish, Classics (Old Norse), and History all in one). Maybe I’m just a cantankerous old curmudgeon, but interdisciplinary classes, to me, are for teaching transferable skills through the rigorous analysis of a small, narrow topic from various disciplinary and cultural standpoints, not for providing broad, shallow overviews of information about everything.

  2. Double degrees. Sequential degrees aren’t double degrees, no matter how the marketing department spins it. They’re two degrees done one after the other, something that could have been done under the old system.

    In fact, this is probably the one thing that would turn me off going to Melbourne — the thing I was surest about in Year 13 (Year 12 in the Hong Kong school system – we start counting school years from 1 instead of K) was wanting to do multiple disparate subjects in great depth at the same time, whether it was aerospace engineering and English literature, or chemistry and development economics, or clarinet performance and international law (I have a lot of interests). Breadth is nice, but it isn’t really a substitute for a double degree, particularly if it were a broad double degree like Arts/Science where the freedom to study what you wanted would far exceed the offerings of any Melbourne Model degree.

  3. Being able to stay in uni for six years and not facing the real world until then.
  4. I’m not a particular fan of the new music degree. It has some good points, like the more intense theory and aural training, but the new history subjects are far too broad for my taste, and specialisations are much better handled under the old system. Although I guess it’s not really something to be bothered about given that there are only very subtle differences between the heritage and the Melbourne Model degree and the experience under either is interchangeable if you’re not a double degree student.
  5. Student centres! Whose brilliant idea was it to make Music share a student centre with Arts, and to put the whole thing ages away in Old Arts, replacing the perfectly functional administrative centre at the front office inside the Music building? And then to staff the student centre with a whole bunch of advisers who just tell you to go back to the front office anyway? I mean, why not just make the front office a separate student centre for Music students only? I know we’re getting our own in the near future, and the Arts thing is only temporary, but why go through all the trouble of having a new merged student centre when you already have an administrative office?

Again, I make these comments in a personal capacity and not as an Music Student’s Society rep. I have no idea what my constituents think (yes, I know, I’m a terrible politician).

In other news, ANAM is being reinstated for 2009 as a transitional measure so as not to leave students out in the cold while AIMP is being set up. I’m glad someone up there has sense.