And here comes another year…

Hola. A big welcome to our new firsties, and to those who have graduated to the second year blog, as well as to the great unwashed adolescent masses who will be upon us soon for Orientation Week.

A new year, of course, also means new existential reflection on the meaning of life so far and the years to come.

This year, it’s all about age and blogging. When I first started writing this blog, which was almost three years ago, I really wondered how relevant my thoughts would actually be to other first years. I didn’t know anyone else who did my degree. Or anyone who had my personal background. And, having been through four years of university, I am fairly sure that I still don’t know anyone with the same mix of interests as me.

Since then, as I have grown older, my relevance to nervous first-years has continued to tank. I am in my fourth year, which is now a non-existent institution in these days of 3-year Melbourne Model degrees, doing a double degree that no longer exists as a double degree, and one degree that no longer exists at undergraduate at all. I also no longer really care about many of the things that new university students care about – I can’t remember the last time I worried about making friends, for example, or the last time I thought about finding help at university, and I always feel like a massive liar when this blog automatically ticks off ‘Second year’ on the tags list.

What this means is that I’m really not sure about what to fill the remaining three years of blog posts with – I don’t graduate until 2012, but it’s been a really long time since anything I’ve done could conceivably count as ‘transition and orientation’. So, some quick questions that I’d like to ask readers:

1) do you people actually care what goes on in my life academically, given that it probably has very little relevance to what goes on in your lives academically?

2) same thing, but with activities outside of uni

3) why do people read the Seconds blog? Is it to keep up with posters you met on the Firsts blog? Is it because you want to prepare for second-plus year? Is it because it gives you a more complete snapshot of what the university is like? Or do you just like the gossip?

Thoughts appreciated please.