University Life

So, Lancaster University. Michaelmas Term. Week 7.

Good Lord, are we there already? That's worrying.

I honestly don't know how postgraduates and second and third years cope. Frankly, University is a terrifying and equally rewarding experience. There seems to be an assumption that most people here are eighteen and have done A-Levels. I qualify for neither of these endowments and as such feel thoroughly excluded from the learning style - at least in Psychology - which is my minor subject.

It's irritating. I want to study music. I want to study harmony and technology. I want to sit here with Max/MSP and create crazy sounds. I want to just for once write a bloody third inversion chord - I would love that right now (although that's not part of the harmony exercises) and fill my work with parallel fifths. That's not to say that I don't enjoy the harmony exercises right now. Surprisingly, I love it. I absolutely do; admittedly the rules we are working to are Bach-based, so effectively rather limited, but it's still *fun* even if it's incredibly hard at times. I feel like I've made massive progress there.

Psychology is a different matter. Scattershot, irrelevant lectures, secret assessments that I seem to know NOTHING about until the marks are published and can't find mine there - indicating that I've missed the assessment and finding out that textbooks exist that I wasn't told about and that I wasn't given my actual timetable until recently. I was supposedly given them at the point of signing up - my arse was I - and now as a result I'm behind, don't have a textbook and have missed two assessments. Then I have an essay due in that all the books in the library have already been claimed and are reserved WELL past the due date of the actual work and I'm going to continue to complain and bitch and blame everyone but myself. That would be in keeping with the Duncan philosophy at least.

Funny for an existentialist and I suppose that this is all as much my fault as anyone elses' but there is just no communication to the students in my minor. We just turn up here, write this and then go there and whilst University is supposed to be independent - I am not some sort of essay-writing, WBA-doing (I fucking HATE WBA's) robot and if I'm not TOLD when I need to do them, then it won't happen.

So here ends the rant that if you sat through I am both impressed and surprised.

Signing off...