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Life cycles
I'm pretty agnostic about astrology, but it is fun to consider sometimes. I have my shagging guys cycle, of about one every five years (I'm overdue at present, and even if I did find Australian men - at least the ones found in Canberra - the slightest bit attractive, my libido seems to have dropped into a hole, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, even if one were handy).
It also seems I have a tertiary education cycle of just over a decade. I first enrolled at university in 1987, and dropped out within 6 months. Damn the fact I'd actually have to do some study (since I never did at school - Mr Perjanik, my 5th Form English teacher, was spot-on when he said I'd crash and burn when I hit varsity), that I also had to support myself by working 30-odd hours a week, and I'd discovered there were all these cute dykes on campus to shag (and lots of attendant drama). And politics, god help us.
Then when I lost my photolithography job in 1996, I had no frigging idea what I was going to do career-wise. I flailed around a bit, and basically fell into IT. As part of that flailing around, I re-enrolled at university in '97, and was starting to accumulate what was going to be a computational linguistics kind of degree. I finished nearly a third of a degree, and had plans to enrol at Trinity College in Dublin (the course convenor was keen to get me on board, for some reason). I moved to England in 1998, and found that I would have to work there for at least three years before becoming eligible for the extremely generous educational grants available in Ireland (despite having Irish citizenship, I wasn't educated there, thus the qualification period for the grants). After spending three years in England, I would have gone insane if I'd had to stay another four years to complete a degree, let along as an impoverished student. So that was that.
Today I've embarked on the first little hop into my latest academic endeavours. I'm doing an introductory course - post-graduate study for dummies, aka "PG-PREP", which is designed to ramp up us poor benighted souls into coping with post-grad courses. It looks like I'm the only one in the class who hasn't completed an undergrad degree, though. The tutor seems sensible and down to earth, and is totally across the fact that (antipodean) universities often expect students to have a certain skillset, without ever having imparted these skills, or even making it clear from the outset which ones are required, or acknowleging the fact that they can change (such as when moving from undergrad to postgrad work).
The course is going to cover such things as essay-writing skills, required citation styles, critical thinking/analysis (and she's right, it's not taught systematically at university, and it should be, for every course, not just the occasional history or politics unit), how literature reviews and reports ought to be structured, and even such organisational things as if it's not on the official unit outline, it should not be assessed. Conversely, if it is on the unit outline, it should be prepared for! So that all sounds good. This course is taking place twice a week until the beginning of the semester at the end of Feb. Eee!
It also seems I have a tertiary education cycle of just over a decade. I first enrolled at university in 1987, and dropped out within 6 months. Damn the fact I'd actually have to do some study (since I never did at school - Mr Perjanik, my 5th Form English teacher, was spot-on when he said I'd crash and burn when I hit varsity), that I also had to support myself by working 30-odd hours a week, and I'd discovered there were all these cute dykes on campus to shag (and lots of attendant drama). And politics, god help us.
Then when I lost my photolithography job in 1996, I had no frigging idea what I was going to do career-wise. I flailed around a bit, and basically fell into IT. As part of that flailing around, I re-enrolled at university in '97, and was starting to accumulate what was going to be a computational linguistics kind of degree. I finished nearly a third of a degree, and had plans to enrol at Trinity College in Dublin (the course convenor was keen to get me on board, for some reason). I moved to England in 1998, and found that I would have to work there for at least three years before becoming eligible for the extremely generous educational grants available in Ireland (despite having Irish citizenship, I wasn't educated there, thus the qualification period for the grants). After spending three years in England, I would have gone insane if I'd had to stay another four years to complete a degree, let along as an impoverished student. So that was that.
Today I've embarked on the first little hop into my latest academic endeavours. I'm doing an introductory course - post-graduate study for dummies, aka "PG-PREP", which is designed to ramp up us poor benighted souls into coping with post-grad courses. It looks like I'm the only one in the class who hasn't completed an undergrad degree, though. The tutor seems sensible and down to earth, and is totally across the fact that (antipodean) universities often expect students to have a certain skillset, without ever having imparted these skills, or even making it clear from the outset which ones are required, or acknowleging the fact that they can change (such as when moving from undergrad to postgrad work).
The course is going to cover such things as essay-writing skills, required citation styles, critical thinking/analysis (and she's right, it's not taught systematically at university, and it should be, for every course, not just the occasional history or politics unit), how literature reviews and reports ought to be structured, and even such organisational things as if it's not on the official unit outline, it should not be assessed. Conversely, if it is on the unit outline, it should be prepared for! So that all sounds good. This course is taking place twice a week until the beginning of the semester at the end of Feb. Eee!