I was on the fence last year about whether or not I wanted to do medicine. On the one hand, it'd be a rewarding job and I'd likely get the validation I'd always wanted; on the other, was it really what I wanted to do? No. My favourite class was always English or Literature, and I enjoyed the classroom environment. More than that, I enjoyed the ambience of the English office; I'd spend some time in there for school papers and the like, nothing bad. Just watching the teachers all sitting around laughing, marking and cross-marking essays, offering opinions on each other's students' essays - I wanted that. To be in that kind of environment. I know not every school is the same, but still - all the books and the research and the writing. I love that kind of stuff.
Choosing to do English teaching was a last-minute decision. Literally. For university offers here, we are only offered our first course preference from a single university (the first one we make the grades for at least). We can either choose to accept the first round offer or wait for second round offers; when we get our second round offers our first round ones are cancelled. For my first round I was offered my second preference - I'm not ashamed to say I didn't get my first preference into medicine. Still, I wanted to keep my options open. But a couple hours before my second round was supposed to come in, I decided I wanted to do teaching after all.
I enrolled in the Bachelor of Education aimed at secondary students at Edith Cowan University. It's strange. When I was little I never wanted to be a princess or a fairy or a ballerina; I wanted to be a teacher. A primary school teacher, granted, but a teacher nonetheless. My brother said something the other day - this was surprising not only for its astuteness, but because it wasn't carried by an unpleasant tone. He remarked that it was funny how life turned out for me exactly how I had planned it as a child. Everything had come sort of... full circle. And it makes me happy to know that the decisions I had made as a child were the ones I would follow through with as an adult.
The courses at ECU in my major are brilliant; I was still on the fence about what I was going to choose when I researched it. They had classics courses, fiction to film, poetry, children's fantasy, graphic novels, just so much on offer. I think my mind was pretty much made up then; I enrolled not long after. I encountered some difficulties with choosing my minor as a) I didn't know what the hell a minor was, and b) I didn't know whereabouts I was meant to choose from. I ended up enrolling in Social Sciences, so that I might be a teacher of history, economics, geography and politics to years 7 to 10. I might go back someday and major in it; being a history teacher was a close second to my first English preference. I was on the fence about choosing science, but then I'd have to do science and I didn't really feel like returning to that. I was also considering choosing religion, because I had always been pretty good at that, but apparently you have to be a recognised Catholic to do that.
University is hard - harder than high school, though I would say it is definitely less stressful. Even if you have assessments for all classes due in the same week you've still got around five days to work through them all, unlike high school, where you'd probably have to stay up until the early hours of the morning to get everything done. There's no high-stakes testing pressures, either - we're all done with it now, thank God. The strange thing about my uni is that it is multi-campus; I know there are quite a few unis that have rural campuses, but ECU has two separate campuses within a half-hour's travel for me. There's one at Joondalup - the main one - and at Mount Lawley, which I go to as it has all my classes there this year. Apparently if you're a student there you usually end up having lectures and tutorials at both campuses by the time you've graduated. I reckon that's pretty cool - I haven't been to the Joondalup campus yet, but my friend has as she says it's around twice the size of ML. ML's pretty easy to get lost in though, so I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to it or not.
Assessments are weird here. I suppose they're weird at all universities, though. In high-school, you had free reign over what your assessment looked like, or it was handwritten so presentation wasn't even really a factor. But in uni you have to have your margins a certain way, Times New Roman double-spaced and a formatted header and footer. Luckily formatting is to me what cleaning is to Monica, so I'm pretty much set - to the point where I've actually almost finished an entire semester's worth of work in one class and I'm only half-way through. So I'll be catching up with the other classes soon, especially since next week is the mid-semester break. Essays galore for me!
So that's life for me at uni at the moment. I'll be keeping you all updated, hopefully some of my scores come in soon.
Thanks for reading!
The courses at ECU in my major are brilliant; I was still on the fence about what I was going to choose when I researched it. They had classics courses, fiction to film, poetry, children's fantasy, graphic novels, just so much on offer. I think my mind was pretty much made up then; I enrolled not long after. I encountered some difficulties with choosing my minor as a) I didn't know what the hell a minor was, and b) I didn't know whereabouts I was meant to choose from. I ended up enrolling in Social Sciences, so that I might be a teacher of history, economics, geography and politics to years 7 to 10. I might go back someday and major in it; being a history teacher was a close second to my first English preference. I was on the fence about choosing science, but then I'd have to do science and I didn't really feel like returning to that. I was also considering choosing religion, because I had always been pretty good at that, but apparently you have to be a recognised Catholic to do that.
University is hard - harder than high school, though I would say it is definitely less stressful. Even if you have assessments for all classes due in the same week you've still got around five days to work through them all, unlike high school, where you'd probably have to stay up until the early hours of the morning to get everything done. There's no high-stakes testing pressures, either - we're all done with it now, thank God. The strange thing about my uni is that it is multi-campus; I know there are quite a few unis that have rural campuses, but ECU has two separate campuses within a half-hour's travel for me. There's one at Joondalup - the main one - and at Mount Lawley, which I go to as it has all my classes there this year. Apparently if you're a student there you usually end up having lectures and tutorials at both campuses by the time you've graduated. I reckon that's pretty cool - I haven't been to the Joondalup campus yet, but my friend has as she says it's around twice the size of ML. ML's pretty easy to get lost in though, so I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to it or not.
Assessments are weird here. I suppose they're weird at all universities, though. In high-school, you had free reign over what your assessment looked like, or it was handwritten so presentation wasn't even really a factor. But in uni you have to have your margins a certain way, Times New Roman double-spaced and a formatted header and footer. Luckily formatting is to me what cleaning is to Monica, so I'm pretty much set - to the point where I've actually almost finished an entire semester's worth of work in one class and I'm only half-way through. So I'll be catching up with the other classes soon, especially since next week is the mid-semester break. Essays galore for me!
So that's life for me at uni at the moment. I'll be keeping you all updated, hopefully some of my scores come in soon.
Thanks for reading!
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