Sydney Life

If uni and high school were suburbs of Sydney, right now they’d be Cronulla and Maroubra. They’ve got a bit in common, but once you look closely, they’re worlds apart….

Starting uni is like starting high school all over again.

Except your high school probably didn’t have its own postcode, and it probably didn’t have over 30 000 students.

So starting uni is a tad overwhelming: big deal, you knew that, right? Like a bad haircut, it’ll take a week to settle down, but once you get used to it…no worries.

Let’s get one thing straight: the only similarity between uni and high school is that they both involve education. Other than that, they couldn’t be more different.

First of all, uni is pretty unstructured. It’s not like school, or even TAFE or private colleges, because there are no standard hours that all students must attend. You will go to uni based on your own individual timetable. So if you only have classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, they are the only days you are required to be at uni. Of course, if you’re super-keen go-getters you can always come in, even when you don’t have classes! Fisher Library is open til 10pm for a reason, guys!

This sounded like the sweetest deal to me. My dream life is to wake up at 11, do some reading, meet my mates for coffee, go see a film or visit a museum and have dinner and a few drinks later. Enrolling in an Arts degree seemed like a natural introduction to this lifestyle of leisure. I thought the lack of structure would be fantastic – and it is – but it only works if you are fairly disciplined and are able to study independently. It’s fab to have all that time to yourself, but you’re not supposed to spend it at Bondi Beach (not all of it, anyway.)

This brings me to my next point. At uni, there are no ‘teachers,’ as such, like at high school. There are lecturers and tutors. Lecturers speak to you at lectures (pearl of wisdom number one…) and they are generally experts in their field. Lectures can involve as little as ten or as many as 500 students. Tutors are more like teachers at high school. You will see them at tutorials (pearl number two, guys, in case you’re counting). Tutorials are small group classes where you will study what was discussed in your lectures, in more detail. In a Maths tute (that’s what we uni students call them – it’s all about gangsta rap chic this side of our track) you might go through some problems. In a Psychology tute you could discuss a patient. In a Law tute you might devise ways of dealing with a case. They are more hands-on than lectures and allow you to ask some questions, which can be hard in a lecture, as there are so many people.

What this all means is that you generally only have two points of contact with your tutors and lecturers for a subject each week. This is very different to high school, where you might see your teachers each day. Consequently, there is nobody to remind you about due dates, exams, making study notes - the stuff you need to know! My tip is to grab your free Union diary at the start of semester and (shock, horror) actually use it! If you get organized from the get-go, you’ve got no excuses.